Dabo, a Python/wxPython 3-tier desktop application framework

By Vasudev Ram

Dabo is 3-tier desktop application framework written in Python and wxPython (the Python binding to the cross-platform wxWidgets GUI toolkit written in C++). Both wxPython and wxWidgets are widely used in the industry.

I had come across Dabo some years ago. It looked interesting. Since it is based on wxPython which in turn is based on wxWidgets, which is cross-platform, Dabo is also cross-platform, subject, of course, to the limitations of the underlying tools it is built on.

The main developers of Dabo had a long background in desktop database application development using Visual Foxpro (Wikipedia entry), which works only on Windows. Since some of their customers needed apps on other platforms, they developed Dabo to meet that need.

I had worked on Visual Foxpro many years ago for a medium-sized commercial project, and it was a reasonably powerful database app development tool at the time, though it was slow in performance; it was the first version, IIRC.

The GUI tools shown in my article for Packt Publishing about using xtopdf to create PDF output from various kinds of data, were written using wxPython.

Interesting Stack Overflow post about Dabo in which one of the main developers, participates. Dabo was presented at 3 US PyCons.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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