visual gui ides for python/jythpn

[Luis M. González]

On 24 jun, 04:23, "Ethan Kennerly" <kenne... at finegamedesign.com>
wrote:
> Luis M. Gonzalez wrote:
> > PythonCard is an extremely easy to use alternative.
> > It's like a simplified Visual Basic or Delphi IDE.
> > Check IT out:www.pythoncard.org
>
> I second that!  PythonCard is a rapid way to prototype an ugly Windows GUI.
> (It's not PythonCard's fault that Windows are ugly. ;)  )  I use it for
> prototyping.
>
> But ONLY for prototyping.  At least with my version in Windows, it's got
> bugs in the resource editor.  For example, Korean characters in Korean fonts
> are rotated sideways.  And the color of a font can't be changed; only the
> foreground color can, which corrupts button display.  The send to back/front
> options don't seem to work.  Transparent images (like PNG) don't seem to
> work ... for me, anway.
>
> Yet, still, when I'm rapidly developing the mechanics of a game and need a
> GUI front-end, PythonCard was a quick solution.  It brilliantly stores the
> GUI as a recursive dictionary, which is like XML, only easy for a human to
> read.  The widgets require very little of your coding.  It's got a lot of
> samples, which makes some of its peculiar conventions easy to apply.  And
> any Python app made with the PythonCard framework has a namespace viewer,
> shell, and GUI message integrated into the application.
>
> Flash and Python:  The ultimate GUI prototyping combo?
>
> In my dreams, I would use Flash for the GUI portion of a Python app.  Flash
> is by far my favorite environment for rapidly designing interfaces.  It is
> an (almost) object-oriented drawing environment that can quickly produce
> good visual design.  Because the elements are instances of prototypes (Flash
> calls them symbols), they can be easily replaced and updated at any time.
> The timeline, animation, color, layer, and drawing tools are wonderful.  You
> can quickly make traditional or experimental interfaces.  The only thing
> that sucked (for me), was ActionScript.  It's not bad.  It's quite good for
> interface scripting.  But for back-end procedures it is prison compared to
> Python.
>
> Does anyone successfully use a Flash front-end and Python back-end in
> real-time?  I've tried an example of XMLRPC servers where a Flash app (SWF)
> communicates with Python (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~parente/tech/tr01.shtml),
> but that has a round-trip time that is too slow for something like a
> videogame (updates at 30 frames per second).  Some of the projects at OS
> flash look promising (http://osflash.org/ext_howto), but I haven't found the
> part that says that my interface made in Macromedia Flash (which is a
> fantastic design environment) can be used with my code in Python with a
> real-time frame rate.
>
> -- Ethan

Ethan,

If you are looking for something more ´advanced´ than a simple windows
GUI, I suggest checking out Silverlight, wich is the new deployment
technology that ties Ironpython to the browser.
With it, you can use Ironpython (wich is Python for .NET) to create
apps that run on the browser, the same way you would use javascript,
with a lot of new features like animations (ala flash).
You are not only limited to Ironpython though. You can use any .NET
language, includin other dynamic ones such as Ironruby (not released
yet).
It is a Microsoft technology, but it works on Firefox as well as IE,
on Windows and Mac.
It will also run on linux through a Mono project called Moonlight.

Luis