Re: [Pythoncard-users] The Future of Python Card

[Kevin A. <kev...@gm...>]

On 8/7/07, Tony Cappellini <cap...@gm...> wrote:
> What is the future of Python Card?

There are several futures, depending on the amount of developer
interest, which is currently at a low point. I hadn't been coding for
the last year or so, but recently started making bug fix and
documentation checkins to CVS and plan to release those as 0.8.3, most
likely in September or early October. I still don't expect any major
changes to the current development tree, but I have moved to Python
2.5.x and wxPython 2.8.x for my own work, so that is what I'm testing
against.

While we didn't do a 1.0 release, what we have today is basically what
was planned for 1.0, so depending on who else is interested in more
framework and tools coding, I still expect we'll eventually do an
official 1.0. It would be nice if we could make some big improvements
to the tools part of PythonCard, those changes would not break
existing code, but that is very dependent on Alex and new blood in the
developer part of the project. For anyone listening, speak up if
you're interested by joining pythoncard-devel and making a post of
what you want to work on.

There are a lot of things I would like to do differently in
PythonCard, but I'm pretty sure those changes are drastic enough they
need to be part of a 2.0 branch so we can experiment with using the wx
xml style resources, providing thinner layers on wxPython for better
integration, etc.

Depending on what you use PythonCard for, something like dabo might be
a better fit for you. PythonCard will likely continue to focus on
being a fully integrated and simple framework/environment suitable for
small simple projects and rapid prototype development, but
inappropriate for bigger team projects where raw wxPython and its tool
set is more sensible.

> wx has many widgets that are not part of Python Card.
>
> Will Python Card be modified to include more widgets?

Future versions of PythonCard will get more widgets, but it is highly
unlikely that it will ever provide every widget available in wxPython.
You can always manually place any wxPython widget in your layout,
typically in your on_initialize event handler, just like sizers are
currently handled. What you can't do is place them with the
resourceEditor or have them included in the .rsrc.py file.

It is relatively easy to wrap a wxPython widget as a PythonCard
component, just look at the PythonCard/components directory for many
examples. We should probably have a tutorial covering the various
aspects of a wrapper, but there are several levels for anyone
interested in making a component from a simple wrapper that let's use
you the component in a .rsrc.py file, to adding auto-event binding for
the component, attributes (rather than Get/Set wx methods), and
finally making the component available in the resourceEditor.

You can also provide your own components by using an appcomponents
directory in your applications directory, something like this:
minimal <- directory
    minimal.py
    minimal.rsrc.py
    appcomponents <- directory
        button.py
        mywidget.py

In the example above button.py would override the default button.py
component of PythonCard and the mywidget.py would be your own
component specific to your minimal application.

I hope that helps,

ka