Anyone used Dabo for a medium-big project?

Question

We're at the beginning of a new ERP-ish client-server application, developed as a Python rich client. We're currently evaluating Dabo as our main framework and it looks quite nice and easy to use, but I was wondering, has anyone used it for medium-to-big sized projects?
Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

I have no Dabo experience at all but this question is on the top of the list fo such a long time that I decided to give it a shot:

Framework selection

Assumptions:

1. medium-to-big project: we're talking about a team of more than 20 people working on something for about a year for the first phase. This is usually an expensive and very important effort for the client.
2. this project will have significant amount of users (around a hundred) so performance is essential
3. it's an ERP project so the application will work with large amounts of information
4. you have no prior Dabo experience in your team

Considerations:

1. I could not open Dabo project site right now. There seems to be some server problem. That alone would make me think twice about using it for a big project.
2. It's not a well-known framework. Typing Dabo in Google returns almost no useful results, it does not have a Wikipedia page, all-in-all it's quite obscure. It means that when you will have problems with it (and you will have problems with it) you will have almost no place to go. Your question was unanswered for 8 days on SO, this alone would make me re-consider. If you base your project on an obscure technology you have no previous experience with - it's a huge risk.
3. You don't have people who know that framework in your team. It means that you have to learn it to get any results at all and to master it will require quite significant amount of time. You will have to factor that time into your project plan. Do you really need it?
4. What does this framework give you that you cannot do yourself? Quite a lot of time my team tried to use some third-party component or tool only to find that building a custom one would be faster than dealing with third-party problems and limitations. There are brilliant tools available to people nowadays and we would be lost without them - but you have to carefully consider if this tool is one of them
5. Dabo project version is 0.84. Do you know if they spend time optimising their code for performance at this stage? Did you run any tests to see it will sustain the load you have in your NFRs.

Hope that helps :) Good luck with your project

Answer 2

I'm one of the authors of the Dabo framework. One of our users pointed out to me the extremely negative answer you received, and so I thought I had better chime in and clear up some of the incorrect assumptions in the first reply.

Dabo is indeed well-known in the Python community. I have presented it at 3 of the last 4 US PyCons, and we have several hundred users who subscribe to our email lists. Our website (http://dabodev.com) has not had any service interruptions; I don't know why the first responder claimed to have trouble. Support is through our email lists, and we pride ourselves on helping people quickly and efficiently. Many of the newbie questions help us to identify places where our docs are lacking, so we strongly encourage newcomers to ask questions!

Dabo has been around for 4 years. The fact that it is still a few days away from a 0.9 release is more of a reflection of the rather conservative version numbering of my partner, Paul McNett, than any instabilities in the framework. I know of Dabo apps that have been in production since 2006; I have used it for my own projects since 2004. Whatever importance you attach to release numbers, we are at revision 4522, with consistent work being done to add more and more stuff to the framework; refactor and streamline some of the older code, and yes, clean up some bugs.

Please sign up for our free email support list:

http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/dabo-users

...and ask any questions you may have about Dabo there. Not many people have discovered Stack Overflow yet, so I wouldn't expect very informed answers here yet. There are several regular contributors there who use Dabo on a daily basis, and are usually more than happy to offer their opinions and their help.