On 1/24/07, Ted Roche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> These are slides, not all of the presentation materials. A white paper
> is unlikely in the next 24 hours, but I suspect I'll work up to one. I
> expect to spend most of the session running the demos, browsing the
> website wiki, generating a simple app using the AppWizard and
> dissecting the code. I also have a complete set of screencasts so I've
> got working demos, just in case.

Followup: Thirteen attendees graced the offices of the Amoskeag
Business Incubator for the January meeting of the Python Special
Interest Group of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group. We
followed the usual ritual of announcements, milk & cookies, questions,
news (Django released at 0.95.1, for example), Kent's Korner Module of
the Month: timeit and future announcements: we'll be getting a
demonstration of Django by Dave Rowell at the February 22nd meeting.

I presented from 8 PM to 9:30 PM. As is to be expected, the internet
connection was a bit flaky, so I used primarily local resources,
though my slides do point to the dabodev.com wiki, the mailing lists
and the tracking database. We walked through the slides. There was
quite a discussion on what a rich client was and how Dabo n-tier
differed from distributed computing by including GUI and bizrules
within the desktop client. "Oh, so this is just client-server" was a
response, but I pointed out the benefits of separating UI from
bizobjs, programming to API and not implementation, etc. There was an
interesting range of discussion on why we might want to do this (vs.
console apps, vs. AJAXian LAMP apps, vs. Django-, Twisted-,
TurboGears-, Zope-based web solutions, etc.).

Enough with the slides. We talked through installation (and answered
questions on deploying with Py2EXE), talked about the dabo.pth
features, which most developers were not aware of, and played with a
few of the demos. Emphasizing cross-platform features, though we
stayed in Fedora Core 6 for the presentation, we worked several of the
demos, including the Controls demo (the internet connection was
feeling better at this point) and then went into the AppWizard to
build our own app using local data and a local MySQL engine I had
staged for the demo. That went well and we ran the app and messed with
the data.

We ran reports and had another stumble as *something* seemed to keep
the PDFs from displaying, although they'd appear a few minutes later.
I suspect my FC6 box had gotten terminally confused over the
network... it was feeling like the kind of lag you get with long
timeouts. Undaunted, we pushed forward, opened some report format XML
in an editor to see how easy it was to modify, and then switched to
some of the screencasts to talk about the "two-way tool" design goals
of easy-to-use design surfaces combined with easy-to-modify metadata.

Questions focused on the maturity of the tools, and whether there were
successful deployments in the field to feature as case studies on the
dabodev.com web site. I couldn't really answer those questions, as I
had demoed about as much as I knew up to that point. I emphasized that
the demos were works in progress and several of them were pretty out
of date with the current capabilities of the product. I had really not
had a lot of practical experience yet with the design tools, so I
couldn't speak to their level of maturity either. There's nothing
better to improve your credibility at a presentation than saying
"Honestly, I don't know."

Folks were very interested in what they saw. Several indicated they
would be interested in doing some more research. Others asked me to
keep them abreast of what I learned. Overall, I think we have an
interested group. When you're ready to go on the road with your Dabo
BootCamps, definitely pencil in New Hampshire -- we will get a
classroom full for you!

We raffled off a batch of stuff at the end, including a Socket 370
mobo, a Red Hat ballcap, and (my backup) CD with all the dabo
screencasts, my slides and Ed's PyCon whitepapers from previous years.

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com

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