[Pythonmac-SIG] Making executables for OS X 10.1 and 10.2

[Gary Robinson]

Hi,

I've got a newbie question here.

By way of introduction, I have good experience with python scripting under
solaris, , and a couple decades worth of general programming experience, but
virtually no experience with python on the Mac. And I've never made a
self-contained executable of python code.

I'm considering writing an OS X application that would need to provide
xml-rpc or SOAP services accessible from remote machines, and call such
services on remote machines, AND interact with a pre-existing,
apple-supplied OS X app via Apple Events.

I want to stay away from Objective C because I don't know it and don't want
to spend half my time and energy on memory management. I do know AppleScript
and Python.

The app needs to run on OS X 10.1 and 10.2.

I am considering structuring it as two separate processes: an AppleScript
Studio cocoa app, which interacts with a Python daemon via SOAP, which in
turn provides the xml-rpc or SOAP server that other machines would access.

This division of labor allows each language to do what it can do best.
AppleScript Studio provides a slick GUI, and Python provides the web
services interactivity and business logic. When the user quits the
AppleScript Studio app, it would tell the python app to exit.

Questions:

1) I imagine that the python part would be a standard, non-gui Python script
like one invoked from the command line, although it would be invoked from
AppleScript Studio with the "activate" command. It would not appear in the
dock. It would listen for SOAP calls from the AppleScript studio app to tell
it what to do, while it also listens for remote Web services RPC calls. If
anyone sees any problems with that setup, I'd appreciate it if you could let
me know. 

2) Can I create a Python executable which contains the Python interpreter
itself and runs on both 10.1 and 10.2? The PyObjC folks say they don't have
their stuff working on 10.1 at this point, so I want to be sure that the
regular app-building stuff does work under 10.1.

3) Would such an executable be self-contained enough that it would be
completely independent of any other python installations the user may have
-- such that it would neither interfere with them nor be interfered with by
them?

Many thanks in advance for any help!



--Gary

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Gary Robinson
CEO
Transpose, LLC
grobinson@transpose.com
207-942-3463
http://www.transpose.com
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101454