[Chicago] wxpita

[Feihong Hsu]

I think to join the project you have to get a Google Code account (or maybe you just need a Gmail account), and you go to the project page (http://wxpita.googlecode.com), and click the 'Join project' link. Then I, as the Project Owner, have to approve you as a Project Member.

Once you are a Project Member you should be able to edit the wiki and otherwise muck around. I would love some help getting the documentation written. Or writing simple example programs that are bundled into the examples.zip download.

BTW, I finally added the data binding stuff into the latest release of wxPita. It integrates with an event-driven programming framework called Trellis, which is written by Philip J. Eby. If people are interested, I can do a two-for-one talk about Trellis and wxPita/wxPython. Since I already gave a talk this month, if January is full then I'll wait until February.

Cheers,
Feihong

Clint Laskowski <clint at bluehatsecurity.com> wrote:           I've started to play with wxPita a bit and it is very cool. Is there anything written up on it yet in terms of simple documentation?
 
 How do I join the project or add to the wiki for it? I've started writing some notes and I'd be glad to add them as the start of documentation, if there is interest.
 
 -- Clint
 
 Feihong Hsu wrote: I'm not 100% sure I understand your question, but I'll take a stab at an answer.
   
 The core of wxPita's API is the layout and event binding stuff. All that happens outside of wxPython -- although the names of the classes are the same, no widgets are being created when you're using that part of the framework. 
   
 Since the wxPita classes aren't real widgets, you can't treat them as if they were. So I came up with two special ways to modify the state of the GUI right after the widgets are initialized:
   
 - Fake methods
 - Init callbacks
   
 The fake methods just emulate simple method calls that you can make on the real widgets. For example,
   
 f.combobox.SetSelection(0)
   
 Where f.combobox is a wrapper object for wx.ComboBox. This doesn't execute anything, it just saves the name of the method and its arguments for later, to be invoked right after the real widget is created.
   
 The Init callbacks look like this:
   
 @f.Init
 def _():
     for s in ['cat', 'bat', 'dog', 'foo', 'box']:
         f.combobox.Append(s)
   
     # You can't use a Fake Method for this because wx.Font
     # objects can't be instantiated until the wx.App object has been created:
     f.combobox.SetFont(wx.Font(14, wx.SWISS, wx.NORMAL, wx.NORMAL))
   
 The Init callback is invoked right after widget creation, but the difference is that by that time, the wrapper objects have been replaced by the real widgets. So, whereas f.combobox was a wrapper before, inside the Init callback it's a real live wxPython widget. So you can do anything inside the Init callback that you can normally do in wxPython.
   
 Incidentally, I decided to do away with the Fake Method approach. It's too magical and weird. I also changed the Init callback slightly from how it was in yesterday's presentation (it doesn't accept a parameter anymore, and it can only be used on container wrappers). 
   
 The comments and questions I got were excellent; they really helped me settle certain design decisions that were nagging me.  In particular, the event binding API I devised with was quite ugly, but after fooling around for a while I finally came up with something halfway decent:
   
 @f.button.button_clicked
 def onclick(evt):
     print 'You clicked on', evt.EventObject.GetLabel()
   
 @f.combobox.combobox_selected
 def _(evt)
     print 'You selected', evt.EventObject.GetSelectionString()
   
 f.button2.button_clicked.register(onclick)
   
 Again, I'm still using the wxPython names for everything, except now I provide the option of using the event type IDs, which are generally more descriptive than the the event binder names.
   
 I will see if I can upload everything to Google Code over the weekend. The reason I didn't today was because I got sidetracked by data binding, but I can't figure that out very quickly so I'll just check in what I have now.
   
 Cheers,
 Feihong
   
   sheila miguez <shekay at pobox.com> wrote:    Feihong's talk was fun. I did not hear all of the suggestion about
 delegating things back to the wxWidgets. Could someone give a
 synopsis?
     
 -- 
 sheila
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