Evil, evil wxPython (and a glimmer of hope)

[vivainio at gmail.com]

Ben Finney wrote:

> The web content is a bit sparse; fortunately the code has seen more
> love than the web pages. Wax was the focus of a couple of Google
> "Summer of Code" projects, and new life seems to have been gained as a
> result.

I'm glad to hear that, however, I just took a look at the mailing list:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=9696120&forum_id=44351

"""
I am going to take a break from blogging and my personal
projects.  This includes Wax.  In other words, Wax development will be
on hold for a while.  During this time, I might still address urgent
bugs and such, but I don't plan to add new features.
"""

Things like this raise a bit of concern about the survivability of the
project. I wouldn't mind if it was a relatively independent component
but it *is* one that is heavily dependent on wxPython...

Also, I have some issues with the design (I don't know how misguided
they may in fact be, as you can see I'm a complete wx newbie). I'd like
the wax classes to be mixins instead of superclasses, so I could just
add them to the inheritance hierarchy if I needed the features... then,
if wax suddenly went belly-up, I could just remove the mixins and
reimplement the parts that use those, yielding a plain wxpython app.
The method names, also, could be more_pythonic() so I could easily tell
wax stuff from wx stuff. This would be insane if we were talking about
a "standard" windowing system of some kind, but we have to recognize
that we are dealing with volatile third party code here.