RE: [Pythoncard-users] time to share your PythonCard gripes and likes

[Sells, F. <fr...@ad...>]

I am a PythonCard beginner, having developed a single-window simple app that
is going into production. I previously  developed a dragon-droppings gui
builder for motif in the 90's.  Many of my comments are based on that.
However some core differences between Motif and wxWindows may make those
comments invalid.  I concur with Kevin's ideas and deleted his text where I
have nothing to add for brevity.

A. Pythoncard runtime support.


4. Event hierarchy.=20
Possible alternative: widget property has event-name <=3D> user-defined-name
pair. Only events specified here are available to the application.  All
events go to a central handler which provides a great debug node and not all
that much overhead.  The application registers for named events with a call
like PyCardEventHandler.registerForEvent(user-defined-name,
python-callable).  Benefits include: same method can handle multiple,
similar events, fewer methods=3D=3Dcleaner code.  A pretty-print routine can
show all widgets that generate events.  There can be multiple registrants
for one event (calling order needs to be deterministic, i.e. in order
registered)

5. Additional compound widget. - a static text "label" and a text field=20
good idea; most common use is label:control so you need some way to define
the default spacing so a bunch can be placed in a column with the labels and
data entry fields properly lined up. Anticipate need for one label and
several data entry fields on a single row like city-state-zip.

B. Geometry managements (aka sizers, resizing, etc.)
We had a simple grid (default to 100x100) with "attachment properties" on
each widget.  If both right and left edge of widget were attached, it would
move and resize with window resize, etc.  To simplify the use of
attachement, we had an attachment dialog that had 4 sets of identical
"attaching controls" arranged at North, South, East, West.  Combined with
multiple widget select, you could attache left and right sides of a bunch at
once, then go back and individually set top,bottom.  It was not as elegant
as most UI builders, but it was easy (the product was, after all, "ezX")

New Feature Request: Need to be able to specify containers either in same
file or different file to control multiple widgets at once. Handy for a
"mode change" where one set of controls vanishes and another appears.
Valuable to define this stuff in a different file/window and then import
(perhaps only at runtime, use space holder in resource editor) so gui is
more modular.

New Feature Request: Need to be able to "invoke" PythonCard GUI from
standard Python code, rather than subclass.  Gives much greater flexibility
to developer.

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