[Pythonmac-SIG] RE: What is a good working environment?

[Lee Cullens]

Thanks for your experienced guidance Bob,

In retrospect, I guess my limited and naive exposure thus far has 
yielded up as many "annoyances" in 2.3 as in 2.4, so it was unfair 
diminishing the state of 2.4.  Also, the new (to me) considerations 
regarding pygame and wxPython are applicable to both versions I'm sure. 
  Is there some middle ground approach I might use for Mac OS X only 
development and deployment?  The multimedia development I do goes 
beyond reasonable expectations with Director and Lingo scripting (and I 
have considerable experience there).

One response mentioned how they were using Python and PyQT.   My 
response might give a better idea of my mindset:
------------
My goal is to accomplish what I want to with Python and its components 
and I'm still naive enough to think I might be able to without undo 
hassle :~)

I, of course, am not under any commercial pressure anymore and would 
not take on any occasional client project without doing feasibility 
testing of applicable functionality first.

In my "working" career I was (among other things) involved in 
engineering modeling systems that are I'm sure quite outdated by now.  
The point being that such started with assembler and evolved through 
Fortran, APL, Pascal and C (first on IBM then HP Unix distributed 
systems) - areas I have no desire to get back into.  The other areas 
were business applications with COBOL and flash-in-the pants higher 
level tools that is even more unappealing anymore.

The upstart is that there are still a lot of different ideas I'd like 
to develop (in the sense of keeping my head busy) especially on the new 
Mac, but don't want to get off on too many troublesome tangents ;')  I 
imagine though, that in holding down the size of executables some of 
the Python "components" will involve compile steps.  What ever happened 
to my "perfect world" dreams :<))
--------------

Thanks yet again Bob,
Lee C


On Apr 5, 2005, at 2:13 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

>
> On Apr 5, 2005, at 8:20 AM, Lee Cullens wrote:
>
>> What is a good working environment?
>>
>> All of what Bob did for us is nice for exploring changes in 2.4 but 
>> is still too much of a WIP.   I (as many of you) need to get on with 
>> some development work though and was wondering what basis to work 
>> from.
>
> No, it's not a WIP.  Python 2.4.1 is perfectly stable (FAR more so 
> than 2.3.0, actually).  Except for packages that I don't package 
> myself, namely wxPython and matplotlib, everything in the 
> pythonmac.org repository should also be available for Python 2.4.
>
> Also, I stopped using Python 2.3 after I built the 2.4.1 installer, so 
> any packages built from here on out for 2.3 will be largely untested.  
> I only build them as a convenience, because it's very little 
> additional effort for me to do.  Of course, nothing in the repository 
> has any guarantee, but most of the stuff in there I use, so it can be 
> considered tested -- but only for Python 2.4 (unless it has been in 
> there a while).
>
>> Mostly what I will be doing is prototyping components of larger 
>> systems (and then maybe convincing them they can't do it any better 
>> than with Python :)), and multimedia presentations (beyond Director) 
>> that include animation (2d and 3D) and reinforcing gaming (word 
>> puzzels, image puzzles, and combinations).
>
> pygame + pyOpenGL may very well be the best solution for this.  It's 
> much simpler to understand than wxPython, and it's cross-platform.  
> The downsides are that there is no widget set, it can not integrate 
> with one (in a sane cross-platform manner), and you are limited to one 
> window.  Both of these packages are available for Python 2.4.
>
>> What I want to do for myself I'm content with doing only for Mac OS X 
>> (10.3.8+) and may deliver some via the web.  However, what little I 
>> do for corporate clients anymore (don't want to get bogged down in 
>> work work) they still seem to want for MS Windows :( dislike that 
>> platform).
>>
>> Anyway, since all the components aren't there yet for Python 2.4 (and 
>> what are seem to be less than production quality), I'm assuming that 
>> at least 2.3 is solid enough (relatively speaking :).  At least all 
>> the components are there (with the caveat of what was recently 
>> discussed regarding overall coordination and quality control).  I'm 
>> also assuming that with the state of Python, Tiger will probably not 
>> go beyond 2.3 (not asking you to make any frowned upon predictions).
>
> Python 2.4.1 *is* production quality.  All of the packages that I have 
> built for 2.4.1 work exactly the same as they do on 2.3, but faster 
> and with less bugs.  The Python 2.3.0 interpreter that ships with Mac 
> OS X 10.3 is *almost* production quality.  The fact that the 
> distribution I built didn't include a help book (which was apparently 
> built by hand, and made available separately) really has no relevance 
> at all to its "production quality".
>
> I *highly* recommend that you use Python 2.4.
>
>> So to look as well as possible on the Mac I should use what graphics 
>> components?  Then for MS Windows candidates (cross-platform) I should 
>> use wxPython for graphics components?  I *have* been perusing the 
>> components list (http://pythonmac.org/packages/) and brief 
>> descriptions, but only a limited amount of the detailed documentation 
>> so far.  One point about the component list - I should use only the 
>> component versions flagged for py2.3 if such is to be my production 
>> platform? (Dumb questions sometimes yield surprising answers)
>
> I'd recommend pygame first, unless you have some requirements that it 
> can't handle.
>
>> Another very novice question - for the MS Windows executables do I 
>> need to transfer my script packages to my clunky old PC and construct 
>> such there, or can py2exe construct such on my Mac?
>
> Neither cx_Freeze nor py2exe make it reasonable to "cross-compile" 
> like this.  You will have to use Windows.
>
> -bob
>