hoadlck/dda

Django Desktop Application

dda - Django Desktop Application

Introduction

DDA is an example project to demonstrate how to use Django as a desktop application. It provides an alternative to using a GUI framework such as Tkinter or PyQt.

It is a work in progress.

Developer Initial Setup

First, install Python 3.4. The application will probably work with any 3.x version, but it has only been tested on 3.4.

Initial Install

(527)% virtualenv env
(528)% source env/Scripts/activate
(env)(529)% pip install -r requirements.txt

Note	The above commands assumes that you have virtualenv on your path. If you do not, then you will need to list the entire path to execute it. For example, /c/Python34/Scripts/virtualenv would be the path for a Windows install (assuming you were running a Bash shell).

Because this repo includes a database, you do not need to run migrate to create it yourself.

Usage

At the command line, type the following.

Run Application

(env)(530)% python manage.py runserver

Open up your favourite web browser, and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8000/.

At the top of the web page window, you will see the application menu. You can access the Administration content under the drop down menu of the same name. The login name is admin and the password is admin.

Credits

To allow the Django Desktop Application to access common javascript and css files used by the web pages (without having to hit the network), I have included copies in this distribution. Here is a list:

• jQuery (Version 2.1.1)

• Bootstrap (Version 3.3.1)

• Glyphicons (Graciously donated to Bootstrap)

• Bootstrap Select (Version 1.6.3)

They are all awesome.

Things To Do

• Freeze Application
  There is some experimental content that calls cx_freeze, but the resulting executable does not run successfully.

• Create Installer
  Add NSIS installer for application. This is easy enough to do, but there is not much point in doing it until the freeze problem is addressed.

• Use A More Robust Local Webserver
  Right now, the application is using the built-in Django webserver (in debug mode!). Other people that have used Django in this way have used CherryPy, and I plan on doing the same. Eventually.
  I would really like to get this working using the built-in webserver, as I think that this may be just fine for simple applications. (And, I have been beating my head against it for long enough, that I want to get it working from sheer stubbornness.)
  See this example for using CherryPy.
  Here is another example.
  As well as here.
  This example uses Python 2.7, where I am using Python 3.4.

dda's Issues

Create Installer

Create example NSIS installer for application.

Get Freeze Of Application Working

Application should work as a frozen executable: right now, it only works if Python 3.4 is installed.

As a workaround, I could wrap up the entire virtual environment. But, that is not very elegant...