Hi All,
First I would like to introduce myself. I am an ecologist that is a long-term
user of Visual Foxpro. I have written many many applications using VFP for
both clients and myself. Usually to manipulate and summarize large biological
datasets.
In recent times I have migrated from Windows to Ubuntu and replaced nearly all
my applications I use in my business except those dependant on VFP. I run
these applications and use VFP in interactive mode on a Virtual Machine.
A programmer at heart I am now looking for a replacement to VFP that will
operate in UNIX, Windows and Mac environments. After many months I decided
Python was the package that (a) was the most familiar to me, (2) was the most
OS agnostic, and (3) appeared to provide similar functionality, at least in
the programming aspects, to VFP.
After reading Paul McNett's articles on VFP on Linux over the last year I
actually emailed him yesterday to ask if he had moved on with his quest. He
was the one that suggested I look at Dabo and subscribe to this list. As it
was, after I sent him that email I stumbled onto Dabo and quickly realised
that this package was in part a solution to the various questions I had posed
to Paul. For the record I have searched for many months for a system like Dabo
and never once had it provide a hit on Google or appear in any Python pages --
this package is certainly a well kept secret.
As I said, Paul pointed me here and asked me to reiterate my request for
information. I look forward to see what your responses are.
Bye-and-bye: How big is the Dabo Community?
**** ORIGINAL EMAIL ****
Hi Paul,
I just read your article on using Python and Visual Foxpro. Very interesting.
I am a old hack at VFP but recently started looking for an alternative multi-
platform alternative to VFP.
The main reason is a slow shift by my clients (I am an contract ecologist)
away from xbase tables towards things like Oracle. At present tables (ala
xbase) only remain in some legacy database applications and shapefiles (open
standard for storage of geospatial data maintained by ESRI). Even shapefiles
are slowly being replaced by Oracle SDE and PostgreSQL+PostGIS.
As part of my personal plan of going open source I have migrated to Ubuntu, a
Linux OS, and access my legacy programs and tables via Virtual Machines. The
only reason I need to do this is to access my legacy VFP programs and data. I
have literally replace all other business and personal applications.
I have been teaching myself python for several months and slowly getting the
hang of basic operations but find a lack of information on functionality
comparable to VFP (e.g. interactively view tables, create cursors using SQL,
manipulate table data with replace commands, etc).
For example, VFP ODBC Drivers for Linux? Have you ever seen one? Your tutorial
is good but I have not been able to locate a ODBC driver for use on Linux.
Something else I crave is the command console where you type in commands
(preferably in python) and your can 'browse' the result in the same manner as
you would in VFP Cursors. This it seems is an impossibility -- most database
access GUI like wxPython, wxGlade and Qt4 don't appear to do this (that is
have interactive grids). Records appear to be viewed individually, like VFP in
edit mode. Most 'tabulated' data I have seen appear to be GUI front ends to
small XML tables. Most of my tables contain a million or so records.
Have you progressed with your exploration of moving from VFP to Python+MySQL
or PostgreSQL? Do you know of any resources you can point me to that could
help me with my problems? Do you have a sample python script that can access a
MySQL or PostgreSQL, that uses wxPython in an browsing / interactive way, that
I can play with that are also platform independent (i.e. not dependent on ODBC
technology or something else that is only available for windows).
Any help or direction would be appreciated.
--
Cheers Simon
Simon Cropper
Botanicus Australia Pty Ltd
PO Box 160 Sunshine 3020
P: 03 9311 5822. M: 041 830 3437
W: http://www.botanicusaustralia.com.au
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