Python Meeting, 25-Jan-2007: Dabo

[Ted Roche]

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 [1] 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 [2]), 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.

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 the dabo team is ready to go on the road with  
their Dabo BootCamps, definitely pencil in New Hampshire -- I hope we  
will get a classroom full!

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.

Thanks to Kent for the timeit module presentation, Bill for  
organizing, Alex Hewitt for straightening out the network, heckled  
Ben for providing the milk, Janet for the cookies, and the Amoskeag  
Business Incubator for loaning us the space.

[1] Kent's handouts on timeit: http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/ 
Python/timeit.txt

[2] There was a question on the size of the Py2EXE package:  
www.dabodev.com offers a Dabo Runtime Package for Windows which  
includes Python, wxWindows, dabo classes and more and weighs in at  
7.6 megabytes.