Re: [Bacula-devel] [Bacula-users] GUI interface

[Kern S. <ke...@si...>]

On Saturday 30 September 2006 18:07, Peter L. Buschman wrote:
> 
> One of the things that is sorely missing in enterprise backup 
> frameworks is an embedded dynamic language.
> C and C++ APIs tend to be rather inaccessible to users who find 
> themselves limited to which API functions
> the programmer chose to use. Providing easy entrypoints where end 
> users can control and extend a piece
> of software is one of the best ways to foster adoption and possibly 
> even completely unexpected uses of the
> software.

True, which is one of the reasons why I was first leaning towards Python.

> 
> As a Python programmer myself, I would have to say that wxPython 
> would have my vote.  As Jo notes, it does
> have some very nice tools available and is also well documented (the 
> author, Robin Dunn, also released a book
> on it this year which is nicely paced for newcomers).  It is also 
> easily packaged and compiled so distribution of
> programs written in it need not be dependent on a local installation 
> with all dependencies.

I encouraged Nicolas to write the wx-console, but after working with it a bit, 
I'm not very pleased because it is slow, complicated, not very pretty and has 
no GUI interface builder. Qt is fast, elegant, very pretty and has a good GUI 
interface builder -- far superior to glade (the GTK GUI interface builder).

> 
> Possibly the biggest drawback to using Python for a Bacula GUI is 
> that Bacula's Python API does not fully wrap
> the C++ API.  Thus, building a GUI on it would require taking this 
> intermediate step first whereas Kern's choice
> of C++ has no such dependency and is already well-known to him. That 
> said, the foundations are there given that
> Python is already embedded in Bacula. Creating the scaffolding that 
> allows Python to talk to the underlying C++ APIs
> is not rocket science and a lot can be done automatically with tools 
> like SWIG (wxPython itself is created this way
> and is nothing more than a wrapper of wxWidgets).
> 
> Kern is, of course, Bacula's BDFL, so his choice stands. 

Thanks for the kind comment, though I hope we can come up with a better title 
for me that doesn't include the D.  

> Ultimately,  
> the right GUI toolkit is the one the main developer
> is motivated enough to learn and he should have fun doing so.  Those 
> of us in the peanut gallery don't have much right
> to criticize the choice unless we are prepared to dive in and spend 
> as much time on this new component as he is. ;-)

Well, I probably didn't explicitly state it in my email, but yes, this is a 
project I would like to do, but I certainly don't mean to discourage any 
other GUI.  In fact, part of the goal is to create a new Bacula API that this 
GUI will use.  The API should be usable by everyone (Python, Perl, PHP, Java, 
Ruby, C, C++, ...). However, I cannot write an API unless I have a real 
application to use it.

The problem is that so far, there the gconsole is not being developed and no 
longer works correctly in restore mode because the GTK implementors know 
nothing about upward portability, wx-console is not being enhanced because 
its author is studying very hard at University, the pygtk-console doesn't 
look too bad, but author doesn't have the time to work on it (I'm not 
complaining as these things take an enormous amount of time, and everyone 
must earn a living). I have waited but no complete solution or anything else 
has come along yet to replace any of them.  

> 
> --PLB
> 
> At 17:28 30.9.06, Jo wrote:
> 
> >Did you consider wx-python. There is Boa-constructor as the IDE, but
> >apparently you lean very much towards QT. I'm mostly sad because you
> >move away from Python, since I don't know any C++. OTOH I don't have
> >time to pitch in, so I don't really have too much to say about it.
> >I do hope you will find somebody who feels like helping. A GUI for
> >Bacula is long overdue.
> >
> >All the best,
> >
> >Jo
> >
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