[Pythoncard-users] PythonCard suitability for a project; looking for opinions

[Brad A. <bra...@ma...>]

Hi. I've been spending the last few days taking a look at PythonCard, 
and I really like it. Kudos to Kevin, Dan, and the rest of you guys 
for your generosity in building such a nifty open-source tool and 
continuing to plug away at improving it. I'm a Python newbie of about 
six months, but I found PythonCard .8 to be very approachable.  It 
didn't take long to install and get the samples working. The tutorial 
walkthroughs were essential to helping me learn the basics, even 
though there were some bumps along the way (some small changes are 
needed to update the tutorials for .8, such as the reference to 
on_openBackground).

I was looking at PythonCard as a prospective GUI tool for a project 
at work. This project is a client-server-database application 
designed to replace an aging FileMaker solution with a MS SQL Server 
solution for the IT dept database. We need a full client app, not 
just a web interface, and it needs to be cross-platform so it can run 
the GUI on all the computers we manage. We also don't want to spend a 
million years building it, so a scripting approach makes sense rather 
than trying to do it in C++ or Java. So, that leaves us with choices 
like Runtime Revolution, RealBasic, Omnis Studio, etc. Or, we could 
go with open source tools like Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. For a variety 
of reasons, we really like Python the best among these choices, and a 
pure Python solution is likely to be a fairly practical and scalable 
approach as our app grows in complexity. We've used Python shell 
scripts in our environment to great success; it seems like a very 
approachable cross-platform language with many virtues.

The only trouble with Python is that it's not so easy to build GUIs. 
At least, not as easy as in proprietary platforms like RunRev, 
FileMaker, and RealBasic. We have a serious learning curve to climb 
on that front. At least, that's what I thought until I tried 
PythonCard. I've already been able to make a little headway 
prototyping the client app in PythonCard, though I have a long ways 
to go in really understanding the capabilities available in 
PythonCard. So, I have a number of questions, but before I dig in too 
much deeper, I'd like to get some opinions on a couple of basic 
questions.

Here is the first question: Am I crazy for considering PythonCard for 
use in a production environment? PythonCard is obviously not yet 
mature, and still has many gaps in the feature set, not to mention 
bugs. On the plus side, it seems to me that when users report bugs on 
this mailing list, they are generally identified quickly and fixed. 
It also seems to me that if we run into problems or gaps in the 
PythonCard feature set, we can fall back on the more mature wxPython, 
and so have a mix of wxPython and PythonCard in our GUI logic. Also, 
because PythonCard is open source, we can look under the hood figure 
out what's wrong if we need to.  Is this a fair assessment?

Second question: Do you see PythonCard as primarily a tool for 
building GUIs for small, simple apps, or do you think it will scale 
well to more complex apps, in terms of managing that complexity ? 
The app I'm imagining will require many windows, many dialog boxes, 
dynamically changing global menus, contextual menus, keyboard 
shortcuts (including function keys), and validation for data entry 
fields. It would also be nice but not required to have search results 
that populate as the user types, layouts changing within a given 
window, tab order between fields, drag & drop of files onto fields to 
populate paths, user-draggable icon objects, and tabbed interface in 
some windows.

I'd be grateful for any thoughts you can provide on this.

Thanks!

Brad Allen
Omnicom Management Services
Dallas, TX