Integrating a Python GUI into a PowerBuilder App

[Alex Martelli]

"D-Man" <dsh8290 at rit.edu> wrote in message
news:mailman.992616086.24867.python-list at python.org...
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2001 at 05:07:24AM -0700, John Urberg wrote:
> ...
> | Sorry if I was unclear in my previous post.  I can use a Java or VB
> | GUI by making ActiveX controls from GUI panels done in those languages
> | and placing them on a blank PowerBuilder MDI child window.  Since I
> | can't do that in Python, I have to find some other way (making a
>
> I find it hard to believe that you can't do that in Python.  For one
> thing, Jython is an implementation of Python that runs on top of the
> JVM (as opposed to having its own VM implemented in C).  Through the
> use of Jython, Python code can access anything that Java code can.
> Thus if you can use Java, you can use Jython to achieve the same

100%-right.  Specifically, though -- if you can use *UP-TO-DATE*
Java.  If you're stuck with Java 1.0, I don't think Jython will
necessarily run there (e.g. on some old browser that you cannot
upgrade with a recent sunsoft plugin).  But I don't think that's
a problem for ActiveX-controls-made-in-Java (it definitely was
NOT a capability with Java 1.0 and its AWT:-).


> result.  I'm not familiar with ActiveX at all, but if it is related to
> COM, I know that CPython has good COM support.

Yes, but I don't think it directly implements ActiveX controls
with a visual interface (just good ol' plain COM servers).  No
problem, of course, since that's exactly what HTML Scriptlets
are for -- letting you make an ActiveX control out of *ANY*
language supporting the ActiveScripting protocol (as Python
does, with the win32all extensions or in the ActivePython
build).  People who dislike Internet Explorer just don't really
understand what an INCREDIBLE wealth of reusable COM and
ActiveX stuff it's composed of... more even than Mozilla, and
that *IS* saying something:-).


Alex