Standalone Win32 wxPython apps?

[Grant Edwards]

In article <slrna8lkqe.1sf.grante at tuxtop.visi.com>, Grant Edwards wrote:

> I'm considering writing a wxWindows app for Win32.  The only
> way I'm willing to do this is by doing all of the development
> under Unix, and then grit my teeth while I package up the
> final product for Win32.

Well, I wrote and debugged my little app using wxPython under
Linux.  wxPython is pretty easy to pick up.  I tripped over the
geometry management stuff once or twice, but I've been doing Tk
stuff for 6-7 years and never have figured out how Tk packs
things.  The only widget layout scheme I've found that's easier
than wxPython was the box/glue setup in Trestle.

Moving the app to Win32 was surprisingly easy -- there was one
bug in the Win32 wxWindows port I had to work around. Other
than that it just plain worked.

Then I used py2exe to generate my app as an "exe" file along
with about a half-dozen dll and pyd files needed by the exe
file. It would have worked right the very first time, except I
didn't read any of the docs and generated a "console" mode app
instead of a "window" mode app.  A one character change to
setup.py fixed that.

The startup time for my app isn't great, but I was testing
under Win2K on a P266 with 70 or 80 MB of RAM. Everything
pretty much sucks when run on that machine, and mine doesn't
suck that much worse than anything else.

Packaged up the files with inno, and Bob's your uncle!

wxPython and py2exe are just _too_cool_.

Total time required (including writing an emulator for the
network-enabled device to whic my app talks) was about 12
hours.

The previous version of the app (which nobody can get to work
the way they think it's supposed to) was written in C++ and
took 5 or 6 weeks to develop.  I must admit that it does have a
couple feature mine doesn't, although nobody seems to know
how/if they work. ;)

Now, back to real-time stuff and device drivers for a while...

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  I hope something GOOD
                                  at               came in the mail today so
                               visi.com            I have a REASON to live!!