On Mar 31, 2007, at 5:17 PM, Michael Savage wrote:
> Ed, do you have a "Dabo for Dummies" book planned? <vbg>
> i.e. How do I start it? From where, from what. etc.
> Fox it is easy, I double click the fox vfp.exe and voila! a window
> appears
> and I can start right away.
You know, the biggest complaint that the Fox team got from new users
was that they would start up VFP, and then stare at the blank screen,
not knowing what to do! So just having a window open doesn't help
much if you don't know what to do next.
Dabo is a framework for bringing together the "best of breed" of
Python modules for UI and data access, and as such, all you need is a
text editor to get started. Come to think of it, all you need to
create a VFP app is a text editor, too; there's nothing that you
can't do with a PRG that you can do in the VFP IDE.
So what I think you're looking for is just that: an IDE.
Unfortunately, it's not there yet. We have a set of visual tools that
sorta work together, but are mostly separate tools. The one that you
see the most in the screencasts is the Class Designer, which lets you
visually lay out your UI classes. To run that, go to your ide
directory, and run the ClassDesigner.py file. The other tools you
might want to take a look at is CxnEditor.py (the data connection
editor), ReportDesigner.py and MenuDesigner.py.
> Some of the features I like is the "command window" as I learned
> fox by
> experimenting a lot with this wonderful tool. Believe me, this one
> item more
> than any other enamoured me to fox. I could actually test changes
> as I went.
> Of course easy data handling also blew me away as well.
I've shown Dabo to several Fox groups, and the feeling is universal.
Being able to grab an object reference interactively and play around
with it is a critical part of development for VFPers. That's why one
of the first things I created was Dabo's command window.
> To learn python and Dabo, I was planning on starting to replace one
> of my
> long term applications out there. (It has gone through revisions
> from DOS
> till the present VFP9 application.) (This probably won't earn me
> any money,
> now, as there is no impetus to change from the customer. They are
> extremely
> happy. I just know how this one works well, so I believe if I can
> recreate
> this functionality with Dabo and PostgresSQL it would be cool.)
That sounds like a good approach. The worst thing is to try to
create something under pressure, since you're bound to make some
wrong turns, and with no deadline, there's no reason not to chalk it
up to a learning experience, and redo it the right way.
If you need more help, the dabo-users list is probably your best
resource, as there are many folks there who can help answer questions.
-- Ed Leafe
-- http://leafe.com
-- http://dabodev.com
©2007 Ed Leafe |
