VB-like GUI designer?

[simo]

Fred <nobody at nowhere.com> wrote:

> - And last, since we're on the subject of tools available to switch
> from VB... is there a good compiler so as to distribute a GUI Python
> built on either wxW or QT?
> I've seen a bunch of tools like py2exe, freeze, pyPack, Psyco,
> McMillan (RIP?), and distutils, so am a bit lost. Which would you
> recommend?

Ah, you may be stuck there!

I noticed you mentionned customers, so presume you want this to be
closed source?

Well that doesn't really exist for Python, you have to distribute the
.pyc or .pyo files, which are compiled to bytecode, but easy-ish to
disassemble to source.

py2exe is the best program for [pseudo] compiling your Python app, and
bundling all the necessary DLLs etc. together on Windows. I've used
py2exe with PyQt/wxPython sucessfully. It's what BitTorrent uses (I'm
sure you've heard of the wxPython P2P app?)

McMillan Installer is not as good as py2exe on Windows IMHO, but also
works on Linux. Same goes for cx_Freeze.

InnoSetup is an excellant installation package program that can take
the output of py2exe (or whatever) and make a Setup.exe, it's not MSI
mind you, but is free.

IMHO a *machine code* compiler is what is really holding pack Python
adoption on the desktop by a lot of companies, certainly the one I
work for cannot take the risk of having it's software decompiled to
source! Of course, for server-side stuff it's fine.

You could wait for IronPython (or MS Visual Python.NET as it will
probably become!) if you want a standalone binary.....