Python voting demo discussion

[Andrew Dalke]

Alan Dechert:
> Ian Bicking and Andrew Dalke did say they thought Python should be fine
for
> the demo but I didn't get much detail about why we should prefer it over
> some of the other possibilities:  HTML, XML, Perl, Java, PHP, C, C++, C#,
C,
> etc.

Just posted a suggestion in that thread, but figured I would elaborate on it
here.

While Python can do what you want, you'll have to work through some
sort of graphics toolkit to get the screen placement and interface code.
The standard GUI toolkits (wxPython, Qt, SWING, etc.) are designed
for a windowing system with a platform-appropriate look&feel.  As such,
they likely won't give you the sort of control you want over the system,
and you'll end up writing your own.

If you're going to do that, you should look at tools designed for that level
of control.  There are two categories I know of.  One is designed for games,
and the other for multimedia presentations.  For Python, the best bet is
pygame, which uses a lower-level toolkit.  There are likely bindings for
this
toolkit for other languages.  However, in general I've found Python to be
a surperb language and think it would be the easiest development language
for this task.

The other option is to look for multimedia or prototyping systems.  The
best example is Flash, which is often used for animations in web pages.
These can be very fancy with all sorts of novel controls, and the Flash
company (Macromedia) has their software to make it easy to develop
these applications, though I've never used them.  You would also need
to verify you can print from their tools...

So if you want a demo, or you want to experiment with different
interfaces, you might consider using Flash or related tools and only
later, once you're ready for the next development stage, do you
worry about the actual mplementation language used for deployment.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com