[Pythoncard-users] state of the framework - runtime tools

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

PythonCard supports the following runtime tools (command-line switch in
parens).
  Log              (-l)
  Message Watcher  (-m)
  Namespace Viewer (-n)
  Property Editor  (-p)
  Shell            (-s)

The Log facility is defined in log.py. The other runtime tools or their
wrappers are in debug.py. All of the runtime tool windows are children of
the parent app window, so they don't show up on the taskbar. In addition, if
one of the windows is created at startup, then all of the tools are
initialized and available via the Debug menu, otherwise they are not
initialized or available and apps don't incur any startup or memory overhead
from the runtime tools.

All of the runtime windows are done in raw wxPython and their events will
not interfere or show up in the main app event loop. It would be preferable
for the windows to be defined just like other PythonCard
backgrounds/windows, to simplify controlling them from a PythonCard app and
to help with their longer-term maintenance.

The runtime tool window positions, sizes, and whether they are shown by
default is defined in the pythoncard.config.py file or the
pythoncard.user.config.py file if you've saved the settings from the Debug
menu.

You can redirect stdout (print statements) to the shell and back to the
console at any time while an app is running.

The Namespace Viewer and Shell are provided by PyCrust and not part of the
PythonCard framework. The Namespace Viewer shows the local application
namespace. I'll let Patrick go into more detail if he has the time.

The Message Watcher shows all of the events generated and handled by widgets
in PythonCard. Unused events are shown in parens (). Idle events are not
currently generated by the framework, so they are not shown.

The Property Editor allows editing of widget attributes (properties). Only
those attributes that are read-only can't be changed and usually that is
because the attribute can only be set during initialization. The Property
Editor is the key part of the resourceEditor sample.

The Shell is an application in itself, so again I think I'll let Patrick
chime in here if he wants. With a basic application defined, you can then do
just about anything you want from the shell. The shell automatically load a
series of commands such as:

>>> bg = pcapp.getCurrentBackground()
>>> comp = bg.components

by placing the commands in a pycrustrc.py file in the app directory (see the
turtle sample). There have been numerous messages on the list showing how to
add and interact with widgets at runtime. You can also define methods at
runtime, which is shown here:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/770015

The Shell supports command-completion and tool tips, so it is very nice for
interactive programming, learning and testing PythonCard. Again, the turtle
sample is a good example of using the shell. Since the shell is provided via
PyCrust, most of these features aren't limited to just PythonCard, but
PythonCard probably makes the most and best use of PyCrust right now.

ka