On 3/10/07, iain duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Hi folks, I am just wetting my feet with pylons. I am curious whether
> anyone on here has experience integrating desktop apps with pylons
> projects, and if so, would they care to share opinions on feasability,
> when it is worth, how it went, how they did so?
>
> Despite what many would have me believe, IMHO there are still many cases
> where a custom desktop app built in wxPython, wxWidgets and/or Dabo has
> real advantages for an administrator would be doing work on their remote
> databases ( that are in turn web acessible in some other form ). I
> already do this kind of stuff for unrelated work where a web browser is
> totally not an option, so I'm curious about tying them together. And I
> think that as long as a business is making a comparison between .net,
> j2ee, and a python based solution, the python solution is going to have
> to be able to offer up something other web only interaction to be taken
> seriously. And who the heck wants to use hibernate instead of
> SQLAlchemy?
>
> All input appreciated,
> iain

I haven't done it but it's a live issue in our office.  I have one
site that's a web application (Quixote) and will also be a standalone
web application for laptops without Internet access (e.g., for
emergency responders on a truck or ship).  We debated doing a wxPython
interface for the standalone but didn't want to maintain two totally
different APIs.  wxPython has an HTML panel but I don't think it
supports CSS or Javascript, plus how would you make a URL for an
intra-application hyperlink?  So we decided on a local version of the
web application, which has its own set of problems: the browser is an
automomous process unless you embed it in a platform-specific way
(both Windows and Macintosh), the server is either invisible or has
its own little GUI to stop it - which all works differently than a
normal application.  Some say local web applications will be a lot
more common in the future but for now they just look weird to most
users.

I've seen Dabo twice at PyCon and am impressed by it, both for
database CRUD and for general GUI applications.  It's much more
pythonic than raw wxPython, although I'm not sure how it compares to
PythonCard.

Most of our existing applications are FileMaker Pro databases.
They're seriously straining the capacity of FileMaker, plus we don't
want to upgrade to FileMaker 8 -- that would take as much work as
rewriting them in something more forward-compatible.  We've started
migrating them one by one to the web, though we haven't decided
exactly how many will be webified.  The ease of not having to install
them on every desktop is a big win -- especially not having to make
our partners or users install something.  But HTML/Javascript is still
clunky compared to a real GUI application, so it's a tradeoff.
Especially when weighing how many of our potential users don't have
Internet access at their location, or have it only through a slow
wireless connection.

-- 
Mike Orr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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