[Pythoncard-users] FW: reply to Michael Swaine

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Altis [mailto:al...@se...]
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2001 9:12 AM
To: Michael Swaine
Subject: RE: PythonCard


Danger Will Robinson, long message ahead...

The PythonCard project is roughly two and half months old. The beginning is
described at:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2001/08/16/pythonnews.html
After we had the mailing list up I found that there was already a PythonCard
project on SourceForge and so I contacted the project owner. After sending
the email my synapses finally fired and I realized the owner, Dan Winkler,
was the same person as Bill Atkinson hired for the original HyperCard. His
PythonCard example in cvs (now the textIndexer sample) does text hinting for
searches like HyperCard used to use. Anyway, Dan gave us his project space
and I keep bugging him, so hopefully pretty soon he'll start working on
PythonCard again; right now he is playing with Lisp instead of Python.
Rowland Smith and I wrote the original framework which we've been modifying
for the last two months.

We're at the prototype stage right now. I wanted to make it clear that it is
a prototype, so that everyone would understand why the API changes, features
are missing, etc. We are using wxPython as our GUI layer, though it might be
possible to generalize the GUI toolkit used via anygui (another Python
project later. We should be done with the prototype in a few months or less.
Then the API will be pretty stable and we'll rewrite the framework itself to
be more efficient.

The samples that can be written today are rough-equivelants of single
backround, single card stacks where the user code manages data storage. The
addresses sample is a port of the Addresses stack from HyperCard and
includes the HyperTalk export script and documents the conversion process.
The current focus for the PythonCard project is on GUI widgets, menus,
windows, events, fonts, sizers, etc. Pretty soon we'll be getting into
transparent data storage; two of the samples are already using mySQL and
ZODB. We're also getting closer to some of the environment pieces. The
resourceEditor is the beginning of a GUI for laying out widgets. Layout
descriptions are stored in a separate resource (.rsrc.py) file which is
actually a Python dictionary, once it is no longer necessary to hand edit
the resources it will probably be stored in XML format.

The simplest way to see more of PythonCard without reading the message list
archives is to install it and run the samples.py launcher; install and a
quick look should take less than half an hour. samples.py has brief
descriptions of all the samples, displays the source code and resource files
for each sample, and let's you turn on any of the run-time tools: Logging,
Message Watcher, Namespace Viewer, Property Editor, and Shell (full Python
interpreter available at runtime). The shell also serves the same function
as the Message Box in HyperCard, so there is a Debug menu item to "Redirect
stdout to Shell".

PythonCard will probably always be an application framework as well as an
environment, so that people that don't want to use the environment will be
able to code directly in Emacs or another editor. My desire is to keep
PythonCard simple, yet capable, so that simple projects can be coded in an
afternoon without much planning. Pythoncard should provide the application
framework to match Python in elegance and power.

ka