[Pyobjc-dev] Re: Using PyObjC to build production apps

[David E. <epp...@ic...>]

On 12/4/02 10:42 AM -0500 Bill Bumgarner <bb...@co...> wrote:
> As Jack mentioned, there are a couple of rough edges, but PyObjC is
> definitely a viable means of building standalone GUI applications
> targeted to MacOSX in Python.
>
> If you do decide to delve deeper into PyObjC, please grab the
> source/examples/etc from pyobjc.sourceforge.net.   The current repository
> contents is way better than the last released version-- many bug fixes,
> many enhancements to make the programming experience considerably easier
> and more powerful.   Ronald Oussoren has made the interaction between
> ObjC and Python significantly more seamless and bullet proof than the
> last release;   he has gone so far as to identify and workaround some
> very subtle/nasty bugs in certain AppKit classes.

I just grabbed pyobjc itself and was pleasantly surprised -- the project 
builder's basic cocoa-python project works out of the box and creates very 
acceptably small standalone binary (at least I'm assuming it's standalone, 
haven't had a chance to try a different machine without pyobjc installed). 
I guess the rough edges must be further along because I didn't hit any yet. 
I intend to try some simple examples before I start working on the larger 
project I posted about before, but (to answer my previous question of when 
there will be a usable python for standalone apps) at first glance this 
looks usable now.  The ability to use Cocoa, Project Builder, and Interface 
Builder directly is probably a fair trade for lack of cross-platform 
portability.

I'm assuming something more would need to be done to get pyobjc 
applications running on pre-X.2 systems (like, tell users how to install 
python) but that is only a short-term problem.

Quick question on one of those simpler examples I want to try: I'm using a 
python script (based on JvR's W UI system) to make web pages from my 
digital camera's photos, and the user interface part is simple enough (a 
sequence of dialogs with separate windows displaying the photos) that it 
seems like a good place to start.  But has someone already worked on 
getting Python Imaging Library interoperating with pyobjc and X.2 
/usr/bin/python ?  I'm not familiar with compiling external modules for 
Python, but it looks like that part just involves putting PIL's .py and .so 
files in an appropriate place within the project, the part I'm more worried 
about is getting PIL images displayed in the Cocoa UI.

> The examples contained in the repository provide an excellent starting
> point.   In particular, the Web Services Tool and TableModel2  provide
> complete examples of building PyObjC applications using Project Builder
> as the IDE.  There are also examples that demonstrate building
> applications without using PB.

I get not founds when I click on them from pyobjc home -> Examples -> links 
in sidebar.  PyObjC definitely looks good for my purposes, so more 
documentation and examples would be very useful.

I eventually found non-broken links to the examples by browsing cvs, so I 
guess I can download them that way.

--
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
epp...@ic... http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/