Lino compared to other frameworks¶

The following projects do something similar to Lino. If you have used or otherwise know one of them, please write a few sentences about what’s different.

Plain Django ¶

From the technological point of view, Lino applications are just Django projects combined to an ExtJS or React front end. People who know how to host a Django project can also host a Lino application.

Odoo / Tryton ¶

Lino can be compared to Tryton and Odoo (formerly known as OpenERP).

Several technical differences could be mentioned:

Odoo is rather a highly configurable and modularized ERP application while Lino is a framework for creating such applications.
Odoo requires Postgresql as a DBMS while Lino can be used with any DBMS supported by Django.
Odoo addons or Odoo applications (equivalents of plugins in Lino) must be written in the Odoo logic while Lino applications can use any Django packages. Which means that Lino is backed by a bigger community.

Starting at the v9.0 release, Odoo was split into a proprietary enterprise edition with cloud-hosted SaaS and a cut-down community edition. So Odoo is not Free Software in the meaning defined by the FSF. The freely downloadable Community Edition is not for commercial use. It is only for non-profits and students. Besides this it has limited functionality, for example, it works only on Desktop, not on Mobile devices. And functionalities like Accounting, Payroll, Documents, Signing exist only in the Enterprise edition. (Source)

restdb.io ¶

With restdb.io, a company based in Bergen (Norway), you have “collections” (which correspond to Django’s models) and “pages” (which correspond to Django’s views). With restdb you can switch to “developer mode” and edit your database structure. There is a basic user interface for entering data into these collections. And you have an API for accessing the data from other applications. A nice tool, certainly useful for certain kinds of applications.

Lino has more complex UI concepts (tables, form layouts, menus, actions, virtual fields, slave tables, …). restdb.io is not meant for writing e.g. a accounting or calender application.

Lino has no “visual GUI editor”. In Lino you define all these things using Python code, not via a web interface.

Apache Isis ¶

Apache Isis is a DDD framework in Java.

An example application is Estatio, which was developed to fulfil the needs of a big real estate company in the EU. It is Open Source and its main contributor appears to still be the company that created it.