[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: anybody doing GUI development with Python

Jack Jansen jack@oratrix.nl
Sun, 17 Jun 2001 22:33:56 +0200


I'm going to investigate the Cocoa Interface Builder shortly, from
what I've seen of it it looks really really exciting. You build your
GUI in an interactive program, including the connections between the
various UI items and classes in your program. The result is an XML
file that not only describes the UI elements but also these
interactions. Of course this XML file is editable again.

On OSX everything then works automatically, you register your classes
(somehow, I think, I haven't investigated yet:-), load the XML file
and the system does all the callback hookup, etc etc etc.

However, the XML file looks pretty parseable, so for other platforms
we could probably create a backend that would create a Python module
that (a) builds the UI in a package of choice (PythonWin and Tkinter
are probably the first two to do) and (b) sets up the connections.

In a different language than Python this would be quite a lot of work
to do, especially (b), but with Python's introspection features it
should be a breeze (okay, maybe a firm breeze, or a moderate gale, but
at least doable).

I'm going to a Cocoa workshop on saturday to get some hands-on
experience with this stuff, but in the mean time I'd like to hear the
opinions of others who have worked with Cocoa (or it's NeXT
predecessor).
--
Jack Jansen             | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++
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