Comparioson of purpose for PyGUI and AnyGUI ???

[Alex Martelli]

Magnus Lie Hetland <mlh at furu.idi.ntnu.no> wrote:
   ...
> I haven't examined Greg's API in detail lately, but the original
> Anygui API was inspired by it. I do think Greg seems to have a knack
> for simple and pragmatic solutions, while I may have a weakness for
> 'clever' and 'cute' (c.f. Anygui ;)

Yeah, I share that weakness, in terms of character, even though in my
case it's usually kept under control by a lifetime of experience (but
with Anygui we were "just having fun", so...:-).

> Anygui succeeded as a proof of concept, but the burden of sustained
> support and development for many toolkits did make it very impractical
> to keep things going. At the moment the project is effectively on ice.

Very good summary!


> If Greg can make a reasonably full-featured system (which isn't too
> hard to install/compile and has a native look on the major platforms)

I get the impression Greg isn't particularly interested in writing and
maintaining a Windows back-end (and I find hard to fault him for that: I
earn a living mostly developing for Linux, and whenever I possibly can I
use a Mac -- indeed, I deliberately walked away from years of expertise
programming for Win [[see http://www.aleax.it/TutWin32/index.htm]]
because I just couldn't stand it any more...!-).  But surely _some_body
must be willing, able and motivated to work on that...?  Or does
everybody in the world loathe Windows programming so much they will only
do it for financial gain?-)

> I think that would be a major step toward a 'standard' GUI package for
> Python. If not, there are existing packages (e.g. wx) that work very
> well -- perhaps there really isn't a need for anything more standard
> than that?

I think there _is_ a need for something as elegant as Greg's API to take
over, as the emerging de-facto standard, from wxWidgets' more
complicated approach (which wxPython mostly resembles).  To be honest, I
am not adamant enough about it to buy a Windows computer and development
environment (when all of my computers today are Linux or Mac ones) AND
devote time and energy to Windows programming.  But I do think it will
be a pity if everybody else, particularly people who _do_ like Windows,
similarly eschews involvement in PyGUI!-)


Alex