Boa: Is it ready for simple gui design???

[Gregory P. Smith]

On Sat, Apr 07, 2001 at 05:19:32PM +0000, Ron Stephens wrote:
> I know its alpha, I know its not finished, many widgets and controls are
> not yet implemented. I found the online help files, they are pretty
> good. I only need to do fairly simple data input and output forms and
> front ends at this time. Before I spend the considerable time to learn
> the GUI designer part of Boa Constructor well enough to use it, can
> anyone tell me whether it is far enough along to be able to use it to
> design simple GUI front ends?? I do not mind being artificially
> restricted to whichever buttons, menus etc. are already implemented in
> Boa Constructor, as long as there are enough to get along with for
> simple use, and it is far enough along to generate working frame and
> widget combinations, because:::>>>

I sat down with it (0.0.5) last Thursday for about 6 hours to try and
whip up a semi-useful GUI prototype.  It took a little getting used to
at first (the last gui designer I played with was vx-rexx 4 years ago).
Hint: in the editor window there is a good tutorial under its help menu.

Using a combination of boa for layout and the online wxWindows
reference manual for figuring out how to interact with the various
widgets I was able to produce something very basic but reasonable.

Be warned that wxPython and Boa are both a little touchy and bug
prone.  wxPython can crash the interpreter if you do something it
doesn't like due to its simple swig-wrapping of wxWindows (such as
creating a notebook with several pages without creating any panels to
put on the pages).  Boa in one case generated code missing a parameter
(for registering radio button event handlers) but that was easily
fixable by hand.  I also found that it ran -much- better on a real
p3-550 under win2k than on a celery466 laptop under win98.

Using Boa is definately faster than trying to write a GUI by hand,
even with any quirks and bugs.

> check it out if you haven't already...is it free for now as far as I can
> tell??? Will it be costly when it is completed, or will a version of it
> always be available for free??? Is it open source?? Does anyone know???

I believe it is GPL, check for yourself: http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/

-G

-- 
Gregory P. Smith   gnupg/pgp: http://electricrain.com/greg/keys/
                   C379 1F92 3703 52C9 87C4  BE58 6CDA DB87 105D 9163