Standards not standard

[Mike Meyer]

Dark Cowherd <darkcowherd at gmail.com> writes:

>> > I really think that the community needs a lot more of STANDARDS not
>> > a STANDARD GUI
>> 
>> Standards happen in one of two ways. Either an 800-lb gorrilla
>> establishes them by fiat, or a group of people interested in having
>> their code play well together hashes out something after they've all
>> taken a crack at implementing it. The latter is slowly happening in
>> the Python community. But it's a slow process.
>> 
>>    <mike
>> --
> OK let me talk in specifics instead of abstractions.
>
> Lets take a GUI. Consider something like wxGlade or XRCed which
> generates a XML resource file and then wxPython works from it.
>
> Suppose the python community works on defining a standard XML resource file.
>
> Then all wrappers for GUI libraries in Python can optionally support
> this XML resource file.
>
> So if you are unfortunate enough to have to develop GUI applications
> :-) you use the standard XML resource file and pick the wrapper and
> the toolkit that you like.
>
> Then for some reason - you have to switch wrapper or toolkit -  you
> dont have a major crisis, you only have a minor crisis. ;-)
>
> Of course the wrappers and toolkits are free to provide additional
> functionality which the developers using those toolkits may or may not
> choose to use.
>
> I think this is what has happened with the DBAPI 2.0 for e.g.
> kinterbasdb provides DBAPI 2.0 compliant methods for access to
> firebird and also other non-standard methods. This is a GOOD THING and
> my suggestion is that this GOOD THING must propogate into other areas
> like GUI and the Web Toolkits.

Good idea. Are you willing to write the standard, and at least one GUI
toolkit implementation to show that it's workable?

        <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.