GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Gregory Ewing]

Brian Blais wrote:

> I wonder if that sort of philosophy would work: a really nice and  
> clear, pythonic wrapper around a sophisticated, complex, and complete  
> GUI framework. ...  Depending on how it is designed, it might even  be 
> possible to have a multi-framework wrapping, so that someone could  have 
> a Qt-based wrapper, and another using the same module choose to  have it 
> wrap wx.

That's more or less what PyGUI is meant to be, except that the
frameworks currently wrapped are Cocoa, Gtk and pywin32. There's
also a slight difference in emphasis, since PyGUI aims to leverage
platform functionality as much as possible, rather than rely on
a large third-party library that duplicates much of that functionality.

 > It should be thin enough that the underlying GUI
 > library can be called directly, however, or its usefulness will be
 > greatly diminished.

Hmmm... you probably *could* do that with PyGUI if you wanted, but
it would require delving under the covers and dealing with some
stuff that's a bit on the hairy side and wasn't meant to be seen
by ordinary mortals. Also the resulting app would no longer be
cross-platform, and might be tied to details of a particular
version of PyGUI. Possibly some hooks could be added to the API
to make this sort of thing cleaner, though.

-- 
Greg