Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with japaneseinput support
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dethe Elza Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 1:35 PM To: Gábor Farkas Cc: pythonmac-sig@python.org Subject: Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with japaneseinput support so, is there something simpler? maybe a simple gui toolkit built on cocoa? There is a simple GUI toolkit built on Cocoa, it's called PyObjC. For particularly large values of simple, I guess. For those who don't already speak Cocoa, PyObjC is annoyingly cumbersome. Using it requires that you understand Cocoa enough to know how to read its documentation, understand its message model, understand the way it handles object allocation, and be able to use Interface Builder. I get the impression that for those who've used Cocoa and prefer Python, it's a breath of fresh air...but for those who've not been swimming in a vat of Cocoa, it's not quite so appetizing. There are some efforts at making an even simpler interface, namely PyGUI and Renaissance, but I would recommend you work with PyObjC, build your UI with Interface Builder, and use AppKiDo to supplement Apple's documentation. Note this goal from the PyGUI documentation page: Document the API purely in Python terms, so that the programmer does not need to read the documentation for another GUI library, in terms of another language, and translate into Python. - Kent ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with japaneseinput support
On 4/10/06, Kent Quirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: so, is there something simpler? maybe a simple gui toolkit built on cocoa? There is a simple GUI toolkit built on Cocoa, it's called PyObjC. For particularly large values of simple, I guess. For those who don't already speak Cocoa, PyObjC is annoyingly cumbersome. Using it requires that you understand Cocoa enough to know how to read its documentation, understand its message model, understand the way it handles object allocation, and be able to use Interface Builder. The value of simple being: Exposing all of Cocoa, in a standard way so that existing documentation is usable, from Python. The translation makes using Cocoa from Python simple (as simple as it can be). I get the impression that for those who've used Cocoa and prefer Python, it's a breath of fresh air...but for those who've not been swimming in a vat of Cocoa, it's not quite so appetizing. I have not used Objective-C for anything but a couple of trivial tutorials, I dove straight in with Python. I understand there is a bit of a learning curve, and I've blogged about some of my own learning experiences with PyObjC, Renaissance, and my love/hate relationship with Interface Builder on my blog: http://livingcode.blogspot.com/ I've been quiet there for awhile while I write my own blogging software (in PyObjC) to allow me to interate faster and get more of my PyObjC tutorial stuff posted. A lot of the time, when I've felt that I had to do too much work in PyObjC, it's because I was not doing it the Cocoa Way. And I totally agree that it can be a pain to learn The Cocoa Way in order to build a small, simple program. On the other hand, as you graduate to more complex programs, learning to do it right can ease your development work by orders of magnitude, so the investment can pay off. And some of the more hairy parts of Cocoa aren't necessary when you're working in Python, because you can just use the Python standard library (or 3rd party libraries), so you get the best of both worlds. There are some efforts at making an even simpler interface, namely PyGUI and Renaissance, but I would recommend you work with PyObjC, build your UI with Interface Builder, and use AppKiDo to supplement Apple's documentation. Note this goal from the PyGUI documentation page: Document the API purely in Python terms, so that the programmer does not need to read the documentation for another GUI library, in terms of another language, and translate into Python. That can be a good goal, but on the other hand, there is a *lot* of documentation on Cocoa, far more than PyGUI will ever achieve, and the PyObjC bridge makes it trivial to translate that into Python. And I wouldn't expect PyGUI to expose everything from Cocoa (not it's purpose, it's a cross-platform wrapper), so if there's something beyond what PyGUI offers, don't be afraid to dip back to PyObjC. I do think that PyGUI is a much better approach to cross-platform GUI tools than, say, wxPython. The cross-platform abstractions should be kept as high-level as possible, i.e., in Python, not in a huge C++ library that then gets wrapped in Python. --Dethe - Kent ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with japaneseinput support
-Original Message- From: Ronald Oussoren [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 4:42 PM To: Kent Quirk Cc: Dethe Elza; Gábor Farkas; pythonmac-sig@python.org Subject: Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with japaneseinput support snip I get the impression that for those who've used Cocoa and prefer Python, it's a breath of fresh air...but for those who've not been swimming in a vat of Cocoa, it's not quite so appetizing. And to second Dethe: I'm also a python programmer that likes Cocoa. Heck, I wrote[1] PyObjC because I wanted to use Cocoa from Python. Which is kinda the point -- you already knew Cocoa and wanted to use it in a different context. I don't wish to argue about what's really easy or difficult about Cocoa. I was trying to point out that people who don't use Cocoa already, coming at it from Python, find several things about Cocoa to be alien and difficult. And attempting to read and use Cocoa's documentation requires that you already get Cocoa, and understand the logic behind such things as two-stage object creation. I'm really not disparaging Cocoa at all as a development platform. I'm merely trying to point out the impedance mismatch between it and Python. Sometimes people forget how much they had to learn. For people experienced in Cocoa and already familiar with it, the similarities are far more important than the differences, and PyObjC is a wonderful tool. But for users unfamiliar with Cocoa and possibly unfamiliar with the Mac, the learning curve can be formidable. ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with japaneseinput support
On Apr 10, 2006, at 2:21 PM, Kent Quirk wrote: From: Ronald Oussoren [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 4:42 PM To: Kent Quirk Cc: Dethe Elza; Gábor Farkas; pythonmac-sig@python.org Subject: Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with japaneseinput support snip I get the impression that for those who've used Cocoa and prefer Python, it's a breath of fresh air...but for those who've not been swimming in a vat of Cocoa, it's not quite so appetizing. And to second Dethe: I'm also a python programmer that likes Cocoa. Heck, I wrote[1] PyObjC because I wanted to use Cocoa from Python. Which is kinda the point -- you already knew Cocoa and wanted to use it in a different context. I don't wish to argue about what's really easy or difficult about Cocoa. I was trying to point out that people who don't use Cocoa already, coming at it from Python, find several things about Cocoa to be alien and difficult. And attempting to read and use Cocoa's documentation requires that you already get Cocoa, and understand the logic behind such things as two-stage object creation. I'm really not disparaging Cocoa at all as a development platform. I'm merely trying to point out the impedance mismatch between it and Python. Sometimes people forget how much they had to learn. For people experienced in Cocoa and already familiar with it, the similarities are far more important than the differences, and PyObjC is a wonderful tool. But for users unfamiliar with Cocoa and possibly unfamiliar with the Mac, the learning curve can be formidable. There isn't an impedance mismatch between Python and Cocoa. The impedance mismatch is between Cocoa, which is largely declarative, and the other GUI frameworks, which are largely procedural. Python doesn't have any preconception about what a GUI is or how it should work (unless Tkinter counts for that, which it probably shouldn't), so there can't really be a logical impedance mismatch unless you're comparing it to some specific other GUI toolkit. Using wx or Qt brings lots of C++isms, using Tkinter brings lots of TCLisms, and using Cocoa brings Objective-Cisms. It just so happens that Objective-C and Python have very similar object models (more similar than the other choices), so there isn't really that much of an impedance mismatch there -- except for dynamically chosen selectors that happen to depend on non-object signatures. The impedance mismatch is so low in fact that PyObjC doesn't even know anything about GUIs either (unlike the other toolkits, which require a lot of wrapping), it just knows how to bridge the two language runtimes together in a practical way. -bob ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with japaneseinput support
On 4/10/06, Kent Quirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -Original Message- From: Ronald Oussoren [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 4:42 PM To: Kent Quirk Cc: Dethe Elza; Gábor Farkas; pythonmac-sig@python.org Subject: Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] needed: simple gui toolkit with japaneseinput support snip I get the impression that for those who've used Cocoa and prefer Python, it's a breath of fresh air...but for those who've not been swimming in a vat of Cocoa, it's not quite so appetizing. And to second Dethe: I'm also a python programmer that likes Cocoa. Heck, I wrote[1] PyObjC because I wanted to use Cocoa from Python. Which is kinda the point -- you already knew Cocoa and wanted to use it in a different context. Can't speak for Ronald (he's already spoken anyhow), but I learned Cocoa from Python. The most contact I've had with Objective-C is to port code from it into Python so that other folks coming to Cocoa from Python will have more examples to draw on. --Dethe ___ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
