We are proud (and relieved!) to finally release Dabo 0.9.0, the first official release of the framework in six months. We haven't been taking it easy during that period; rather, we made some changes that clean up some weak spots in the codebase, and as a result can offer a much more solid framework, and are on course for a 1.0 release in the near future.

To do this, we made some decisions that break backwards compatibility. We dropped support for Python versions earlier than 2.4, and wxPython versions below 2.8. Supporting everything is nice to aim for, but completely impractical.

There is also a major addition to the framework: the ability to deploy Dabo applications as true web apps. Imagine: being able to develop a rich internet app using nothing but Python on both the client and server! It's still early in the development process, so it's lacking a lot of the supporting tools, and almost no documentation has been created, but that will be coming in the next few weeks/months. When you deploy your app as a web app, all data access and business logic is on the server, and the framework automatically handles the communication between the client and server. The framework also automatically grabs file changes from the server, making UI updates seamless and quick. Lots more interesting stuff will be happening in this area in the near future, so stay tuned!

You can grab the latest version from the Download Page

A fairly comprehensive list of the changes we've made since the last release can be found here: ChangeLog.

-- Ed Leafe

posted at: 12:50 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

Six months since the last release, but many improvements have been made! [changelog]

posted at: 16:51 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

We've gotten good feedback from a number of you - it feels like the number of people trying out Dabo is growing. From now on we'll try to keep to a 5-week point release cycle. But once you download and install a point release, you can always use the new Web Update feature to stay updated. The changes in 0.8.3 can be seen in the change log . Enjoy!

posted at: 13:16 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

We are pleased to announce Dabo 0.8.2, which has many many changes since the last version, including web update, better performance, more widgets, a preference dialog you can use in your apps, and better database support. For a full list of changes, view the change log . Enjoy!

posted at: 11:35 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

Sometimes, even if you know the framework as well as I do, you re- discover a feature that you had forgotten about. This happened tonight as I was going over the interaction between a grid and its form, so I thought I'd pass it along.

When any of the events that cause the current record pointer to move are handled by the form, it generates a dEvents.RowNumChanged event, to which grids can bind so that they can update their display. The form code looked like:

dabo.ui.callAfter(self.raiseEvent, dEvents.RowNumChanged)

and the event handler in the grid would run this code:

try: self.CurrentRow = self.getBizobj().RowNumber except AttributeError: pass

In other words, the grid knew that the row had changed, but had no idea what the new row was. It had to then get a reference to the bizobj for that grid, if any, and then ask that bizobj for its current row number.

Why is this inefficient? Because the code that raised the event *knew* the old and new row numbers; the fact that they were different was why it was raising the event in the first place. Then I remembered that you can pass data along to raiseEvent(); any keyword parameters you add are set as event data. So I changed the form code to read:

dabo.ui.callAfter(self.raiseEvent, dEvents.RowNumChanged, newRowNumber=biz.RowNumber, oldRowNumber=oldRowNum)

...and now the grid's event handler can just reference those values directly! They will have the same names as the parameter keys:

try: self.CurrentRow = evt.newRowNumber except AttributeError: pass

This may be a small savings overall, but I thought that it illustrated a handy mechanism built into the Dabo event class that you might use to improve your applications.

posted at: 18:10 | path: /Tips | permalink

 

I guess we shouldn't have said that Dabo 0.8 is just around the corner! Oh, well... here it is finally. We've really been ramping up the development in anticipation of 1.0 later this year. Please see the change log for all the details, and grab Dabo 0.8 from the download page. Enjoy!

posted at: 03:21 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

Last weekend was PyCon 2007 in Dallas, Texas. We recorded my session on Developing Desktop Applications with Dabo, and have posted the video for those who could not make the conference. It's available at: http://dabodev.com/ pycon2007.

posted at: 15:21 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

We've released Dabo 0.7.2, DaboIDE 0.7.1, and DaboDemo 0.7.2. These are all stable releases and the most important fix is that wxPython 2.8 is finally supported.

See the ChangeLog, and download here. Enjoy!

posted at: 08:30 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

I've just posted an update to the Runtime Engine that fixes some pathing issues that could arise in a few situations - thanks to Joe Brown for helping me work this out. Otherwise the contents are the same as the 0.7 release.

As usual, you can grab it from the Download Page, or via FTP at ftp://dabodev.com/dabo/win.

posted at: 14:19 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

The Dabo Runtime Engine for Windows is a self-contained environment that allows you to run Dabo on Windows without having to first install all of the requirements. It comes with its own version of Python 2.4.4, wxPython 2.6.3.3, and all of the other modules used in Dabo.

The Dabo Runtime Engine is designed for people who are curious about Dabo, but who don't want the bother of installing all the required modules just to see what Dabo can do. It doesn't change any Windows Registry settings, so it will not affect any existing applications on your machine.

This version installs several shortcuts that allow you to simple double-click an icon to run the desired file. Such shortcuts include the AppWizard, Class Designer and Report Designer, as well as several of the demo applications, including the new DaboDemo application, which allows you to see the demo and the code behind it. You can then modify that code to see how your changes affect the output.

The Dabo Runtime Engine comes in two versions: the regular version that just runs the applications, and the Console version that display a command line window containing the application output and debuggng information. They are otherwise identical.

You can download either version, along with all other things Dabo, from: the Dabo Download Page.

posted at: 13:47 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

We are pleased to announce the release of DaboIDE 0.7. This will eventually be a true Integrated Development Environment, but currently contains a few key tools that aren't yet integrated. Nonetheless, you can visually design your GUI forms and controls, including adding code to methods, assigning property values, and laying out the form elements using the Class Designer. You can design custom reports using the Report Designer. You can build a full-featured application for very easily using the App Wizard.

We'd also like to announce the new 0.7.1 bugfix release of Dabo and DaboDemo. Get all this from the download page.

posted at: 13:46 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

This version introduces a new demo application written in Dabo that demonstrates various Dabo UI classes. You can see the objects in action, and the view/modify the code that instantiated the objects. This is based on the excellent demo application framework in wxPython, but rewritten in Dabo code. Oh, and minesweeper is faster. :)

posted at: 21:21 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

It's been a busy year for Paul and Ed, but somehow they've managed, with the help of a growing number of users and contributors, to keep the ball rolling and end up with the next incremental release. There have been lots of enhancements and bugfixes (see the ChangeLog), and we are proud of what we've created. You can get the latest release from the download page. Enjoy!

posted at: 18:44 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

We weren't worried about wxPython 2.7 introducing properties, because we knew it would be a while until wxPython 2.8 (the stable release that would go in all the distributions and application developers would use) came into the wild. However, the good folks over at wxWidgets have decided to turbo charge the effort to get wx2.8 out the door so it can be included in the next release of Apple's OS X. The upshot: wxWidgets 2.7 only just appeared on the scene, yet 2.8 is just around the corner, and current Dabo does not work with it, because of the way property definitions work in Python mix-in classes. Basically, some of wxPython's properties are trumping Dabo's, even though Dabo should be the subclass and thus trump everything.

No worries, though. We know how to proceed, but have decided to wait until after the first release of Dabo-0.7. Once we have the fix in 0.8, we'll backport it to the Dabo-0.7 stable version. So, just be patient for now and keep using wxPython 2.6.x with Dabo.

posted at: 16:25 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

We've uploaded a new stable release, the first since April. Get it from the usual download page. However, stay tuned: hopefully next week we'll be rolling out Dabo-0.7 as the new stable release, and starting development on Dabo-0.8. Ed's been doing most of the work on this, but Paul's been benefitting from the ever-increasing power of the Dabo system in developing several client applications. Thanks as always to everyone asking questions and contributing to the Dabo vision.

posted at: 16:17 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

I just installed a fresh copy of WinXP on a new VM, and wanted to set it up for Dabo development. So I went through the required steps to get all the packages installed, and documented all the necessary URLs. Wow, things have improved on the installation front in the 2 years since I last set up a Windows machine! Every package has a binary installer, making setting up pretty painless. It's documented on this Wiki Page.

posted at: 09:20 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

In response to a question posted on the Dabo Forum on OpenTech, I've put together a screencast that shows how to create a grid using the Class Designer, and then populate it using business objects to get the data. It's about 10.5 minutes long, and the file size is about 10MB, so please be patient if it takes a while to download.

posted at: 12:08 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

These are just some very minor fixes but I wanted to get them released as our activity has waned over the Easter break. Get the new downloads from http://dabodev.com/download.

posted at: 23:03 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

Sorry for the inconvenience, but our website and mailing lists will be down until Monday most likely. You can still access the Subversion repositories (see the links in the next blog entry).

posted at: 09:34 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

With the new Apache server for Subversion, you can now browse the Dabo source code with your web browser. Here are some links:

http://svn.dabodev.com/dabo
http://svn.dabodev.com/dabodemo
http://svn.dabodev.com/daboide

For any given repository, the stable branch is in branches/stable and the development branch is in trunk. Official released versions can be found in tags.

posted at: 14:21 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

We've switched from using Subversion's built-in svnserve server, to using the Apache server with full WebDAV capabilities. We've also changed the DNS name from 'paulmcnett.com' to 'svn.dabodev.com'. The new way to check out the Dabo repositories is:

svn checkout http://svn.dabodev.com/dabo/trunk dabo
svn checkout http://svn.dabodev.com/daboide/trunk daboide
svn checkout http://svn.dabodev.com/dabodemo/trunk dabodemo

To switch your current working copy, you can use:

svn switch --relocate svn://paulmcnett.com http://svn.dabodev.com

posted at: 08:25 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

This is a minor update to the Runtime Engine. Besides containing the latest version of the Dabo libraries, it also fixes some problems with ReportLab that was preventing the ReportDesigner from running. Just run the Uninstall for the old version, and install this, and you should be good to go.

As usual, grab your copy from the Dabo Download Page: http://dabodev.com/download.

posted at: 14:00 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

The AppWizard's table selection page isn't so hokey anymore, allowing one click to toggle the checkbox values. Fixed some unicode problems in dEditor and in saving data back to a database. Fixed a fast cpu problem in the Class Designer. We'd like to thank everyone that is contributing to Dabo by asking questions, submitting issues to the tracker, or just engaging us in discussion.

posted at: 06:50 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

A few minor issues have been fixed in Dabo and DaboIDE since last week.

posted at: 09:16 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

This contains an important fix for the Class Designer, which may not have been finding your class files due to pathing issues previously.

posted at: 06:23 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

The Dabo Runtime Engine for Windows is a self-contained environment that allows you to run Dabo on Windows without having to first install all of the requirements. It comes with its own version of Python 2.4.2, wxPython 2.6.3.0, MySQLdb 1.2.0, kinterbasdb 3.2.0a1, ReportLab v.2463, and several other modules used in Dabo.

The Dabo Runtime Engine is designed for people who are curious about Dabo, but who don't want the bother of installing all the required modules just to see what Dabo can do. It doesn't change any Windows Registry settings, so it will not affect any existing applications on your machine.

This version installs several shortcuts that allow you to simple double-click an icon to run the desired file. Such shortcuts include the AppWizard, ClassDesigner and ReportDesigner, as well as several of the demo applications.

The Dabo Runtime Engine comes in two versions: the regular version that just runs the applications, and the Console version that display a command line window containing the application output. Besides that, they are identical.

You can download either version, along with all other things Dabo, from: the Dabo Download Page.

posted at: 05:13 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

We've begun a stable/dev branch strategy for Dabo; currently, the stable branch is 0.6.x and the dev branch is 0.7a. When we find bugs, we'll backport to the stable branch after fixing the dev branch, and then roll out a new point release when we feel it is appropriate. Anyway, the new releases are available as always from the download page.

posted at: 20:32 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

This fixed a small bug after we had already released 0.6.

posted at: 06:40 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

Grab the latest from the Download Page. Dabo is really shaping up, and it has been a while since the last release, 0.5.1 back in January. There are too many things to list here, but you can always check the ChangeLog file in the root of the Dabo distribution to see what has changed. Also, Ed has summarized the changes here.

In addition to what we've improved in Dabo, we can't forget to mention the Dabo Class Designer, and Dabo Report Designer. Both of these visual design tools are really coming together, and can be found in the DaboIDE repository, which got bumped from version 0.4 to 0.5 today as well. Coming soon will be a graphical menu designer, and coming down the pipe will be an integration of these design tools into an Integrated Development Environment.

posted at: 11:47 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

There is a new service, courtesy of http://www.repocaster.com/, that generates RSS feeds from Subversion repositories. I've registered 3 of the Dabo repositories: the main framework, the IDE code, and the Demo code. The RSS URLs are:

Framework: http://www.repocaster.com/main/get_feed/17

IDE: http://www.repocaster.com/main/get_feed/18

Demo: http://www.repocaster.com/main/get_feed/19

The service isn't completed yet, but I like the idea. If you have an RSS reader, you can add these links and keep up with all the latest changes in Dabo!

posted at: 16:35 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

The Dabo Designer now supports component classes that can be used in multiple forms, with full inheritance maintained. This allows you to not only re-use some useful components, but to have updates to those components automatically appear in the designs that use them.

Let's say you created a 'mover' control: one that moves items between two lists. This can be handy in lots of forms, so you save it as a class. Later on you need to create another form that needs a mover, so you add an instance of your mover class to this new design surface. It will simply work as expected. But now suppose that a few weeks later, after you've used this class in dozens of forms, you discover a bug in your mover code. No problem: just fix the bug in your class, and all the forms that use your mover are also fixed!

posted at: 08:37 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

I've just posted a new screencast that goes through the basics of designing reports. It takes a quick report as generated by a datanav application, and modifies it to provide grouping and subtotaling. Along the way, the viewer should get a good feeling about the capabilities of the report designer as it stands now.

Running time is 23 minutes.

View this and our previous screencasts at http://dabodev.com/documentation.

--Paul

posted at: 12:19 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

I've continued where I left off at the end of my last screencast, and posted part two. This one is only 10 minutes long and has better audio compression, so it should be a lighter download. And, your feedback has resulted in some better features in the Report Designer.

View this and our previous screencasts at http://dabodev.com/documentation.

--Paul

posted at: 12:19 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

As most of you know, I'll be doing a session at this month's PyCon entitled 'The State of Dabo'. My goal is to both educate people about what Dabo can do, as well as impress them with its power. What I'd like to know is what was it about Dabo that first made you consider taking a good look at it; what first made you think "Wow, this could really be useful!". I only have a 30-minute session, which yields about 20 minutes to show stuff, so I obviously can't show everything. Your suggestions will help me focus on what might impress the folks at the session who have never seen Dabo before.

posted at: 06:53 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

The Dabo Editor now supports named bookmarks! This makes it much easier to navigate around a long document. If you want to bookmark a location, make sure that the cursor is on the desired line, and click on the button at the top with the 'M'. Select 'Set Bookmark' from the menu, and enter a brief name to help you remember what that means. You'll see a small cyan circle in the left margin by that line, indicating that it has been bookmarked.

Now navigate to somewhere else in the document. Do whatever editing you need, and then click on the 'M' button again. Note that the name you gave your bookmark is now in the popup menu. Select that, and the editor moves to that line. What's even cooler is that even if you add or delete lines, the bookmark follows the code that you bookmarked, not the line number!

posted at: 10:26 | path: /Tips | permalink

 

A new screencast has been posted: Using Sizers (part 1) It explains a bit about the use of sizers in laying out a form, and how to accomplish this using the Dabo Designer.

posted at: 11:18 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

We've just added support for the SQLite database engine into Dabo. SQLite joins MySQL, PostgreSQL and Firebird as a supported database backend for Dabo.

posted at: 11:14 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

The DaboRuntime for Windows has been updated to version 0.3. The runtime comes with a full copy of the Dabo framework, as well as the Demo and IDE files, and allows you to run any of these on a Windows machines without having to install Python, wxPython, the database modules, etc. The framework code is no longer built into the runtime, so you can update the framework as we continue to improve it.

posted at: 11:14 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

I haven't updated this page in a while, and didn't want anyone to think that we haven't been working hard on Dabo. Currently the big project is figuring out just how to create a completely self-contained runtime distribution on Linux. It's easy if everyone is using Fedora, since that's what we're running on our development machines, but much tougher if we want to support older machines. I'm making progress, so perhaps in the next week or so I'll have some good news. Keep your fingers crossed!

posted at: 11:14 | path: /Announcements | permalink

 

Work continues on the Visual Designer; the property sheet is working well, and the visual layout of controls using sizers is also coming along nicely. We're also able to save the design to an editable XML format, although this is still open to modification. Next up is to create a floating palette to replace the clunky context menu for adding controls.

posted at: 11:14 | path: /Announcements | permalink