Hacking and coding on python, matlab, flex

Topics:

Turbogears and Adobe Flex howto

See demo of the Turbogears JSON server application and Adobe Flex Graphical User Interface client under http://www.mosi.sk/custom/.

Screenshot:

This application was created as a proof of concept, after seeing Kevin Dangoor and RIA Cowboy play with the TG server and Flex client.

The application is a customer / supplier database management tool. It serves for tracking your suppliers or customers, their contacts, rating and supplied goods and services.

About programming:

All in all, the beginning was smooth, documentation of the Flex interface excellent. Coding the Actionscript functions for sorting, search and filtering was not that easy. After the data model went more complex, more problem arose in context with complicated data cross-checking.

Recommendations: sqlite is good for testing purposes, but my advice would be to go directly into MySQL or PostgreSQL. My choice of PostgreSQL was not a good one. The TurboGears project does not support PostgreSQL that good as the other options. For example, creation of tables is smooth in SQLite, not so smooth in PostgreSQL, because of improper order of table creation. This leads to pgsql errors. You have to edit then per hand.

Turbogears 1.0.4b3 contains some errors, choosing the stable 1.0.3 is highly recommended. I can`t wait for stable TurboGears 2.0.

Flex GUI programming is relatively simple for the simple things. It gets messy in the end stages. You have to program basically all behaviour of your elements, including validation of data, filtering functions, selecting indices in tables and lists, etc. It is a great leap forward from other GUI`s, but it takes a lot of time, if you want to implement even something as simple as this database client.

Server runs lighttpd plus Turbogears in WSGI production mode. This does not work with SQLite. Well, it works at the beginning, but after you play with your application, server crashes and SQLite file stays locked.

Feel free to email me under mosi [at] mosi.sk for any comments.

Units Toolbox for Matlab

Unit toolbox for Matlab - UMAT hosted previously on unit.mosi.sk.