GUI Toolkits(Python and XUL)

[Trent Mick]

[Thomas G. Willis wrote]
> Well, I can't remeber exactly where I saw this. But a quick googling 
> brought this up.
> 
> http://www.activestate.com/Corporate/Communications/Releases/Press959150636.html
> 
> http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/137/2000/10/0/4572822/
> 
> Looks like Activestate has abandoned this since there download links are 
> dead on ASPN.
> 
> Anyone have a definitive answer for whether this has been officially 
> discontinued or not?

The PyXPCOM bindings developped by Mark Hammond while at ActiveState
were contributed to the Mozilla core. You can build PyXPCOM as an
extension when building Mozilla via the:

    --enable-extensions=python/xpcom

configure option. PyXPCOM is NOT built by default so you have to build
it yourself. As well, there are no binary distributions around that I
know of. On top of that, building the PyXPCOM extension requires a bit
of work. You need to apply patches to get the build to work with the
current (or recent) Mozilla sources. See this bug:

    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129216


What does PyXPCOM get you? It allows you to write XPCOM object in
Python. It does NOT allow you to directly use Python code in <script/>
tags in XUL (that would be sweet). So to have XUL/Gecko events handled
by Python code you will need JavaScript proxy code that receive the
events and pass on the PyXPCOM code. This can make event handling a
little clumsy, but you can do it.

There is a pyxpcom mailing list:
    http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Browse/Threaded/pyxpcom
that people can sign up for if they like:
    http://listserv.activestate.com/mailman/mysubs


Cheers,
Trent

-- 
Trent Mick
TrentM at ActiveState.com