[Pythonmac-SIG] A newbie wonders about GUIs

[Richard Gordon]

At 6:19 PM -0700 2/12/02, Jamey Osborne wrote:
>For my Gadfly-based project, at least, I'm inclined at this point to 
>put a web server on my PowerBook and handle the GUI through the CGI 
>model!

I don't consider that a bad idea at all, altho I'd have to say that I 
gave up on trying to using pre-OS X Mac for web server stuff quite 
awhile back (which has nothing much to do with python and a lot to do 
with apple events). The advantages include:

a) Pretty simple "programming" for the display via html
b) Extensibility via trick javascript and java
c) theoretical standards
d) any idiot knows how to use a browser in the event that others need 
to use your application

The disadvantages are:

a) having to run a web server
b) Inherent cgi limits on write access (but do-able)
c) Inherent cgi limits on statefulness (but do-able)
d) *entirely* theoretical standards
e) printing reports, altho CSS was supposed to take care of most of this

Anyway, there are some pretty good development frameworks around if 
you choose to go the browser route, altho I suspect all of them 
either require or would work best on OS X. Someone else mentioned 
SkunkWorks and I will mention Webware, both of which are pretty much 
do it yourself and are fine, if a little immature, for their intended 
purposes.

At the moment, I am a big fan of the Zope application server which 
doesn't necessarily even require any python knowledge and does a lot 
of things very well, especially regarding database access (gadfly is 
incorporated in it, altho its real gem is the ZODB object database 
that powers everything). Zope can be heavily customized via external 
methods in python, perl and java and can even work with php if, for 
some bizarre reason, you find that appealing. There are over 500 Zope 
"products" (plugins) that will let you do almost anything you can 
think of and all are open source, so you can change them if you like.


Richard Gordon
--------------------
Gordon Design
Web Design/Database Development
http://www.richardgordon.net