Productive GUI programming - a theory

[sik0fewl]

kkennedy wrote:
> I'm relatively new to Python programming, so forgive me for any
> ignorance.  I've been reading many of the messages here in the group. 
> I am currently working on a small Python project that requires a GUI
> interface.  I went round and round trying to figure out which GUI
> toolkit to use (finally choosing pyGTK), and I see that many others
> have the same questions which to choose.
> 
> Has anyone ever tried to write a "GUI abstraction layer"?  By that, I
> mean using common API "method calls" to create a GUI interface, and
> "under the covers" using the appropriate binding based on OS or user
> choice.  If you are familiar with the Eclipse platform
> (www.eclipse.org).  It uses SWT, which is the abstraction layer.  You
> write code (Java) to one API, and it translates the calls to Win32 on
> Windows, GTK 2 on Linux/Unix, Motif on Linux/Unix, and several others.
> 
> I'm not saying that I'm smart enough to do this, but there are some
> pretty smart people out there working on Python that could pull it
> off.  It would solve a major issue with deploying Python apps... The
> user will have to install each toolset, API, etc. on their computer. 
> This is a hassle, especially on Linux.  Also, the developer could
> learn one API, and not have to worry about specific toolkit bindings.
> 
> Just a thought.  It would definately be a huge project.


See wxWindows (http://www.wxwindows.org) and wxPython 
(http://www.wxpython.org).

-- 
Ryan