[Pythonmac-SIG] Guidance, please?

[Kent Quirk]

Hi, folks. 

 

I'm porting a commercial Python/C++ application from Windows to Mac, and
trying to preserve 95% of the code base as completely cross platform.
It's an OpenGL application that constructs its own GUI in the window, so
I don't need ANY UI widgets. At all.

 

I should warn you that this is my first experience coding for the Mac,
though I have written code for a variety of platforms.

 

The way it works on the PC side is that Python code calls a createWindow
function in our app to manufacture the main window. This creates and
initializes an OpenGL context. It then calls a mainloop() function that
only returns when the app closes. The mainloop() knows about the GL
context and can manipulate it. 

 

Our first pass at the port attempts to use Carbon to do the same thing.
Everything has compiled and the app basically runs, but there are
definitely issues, and in many ways the world would be made much nicer
if we did something more appropriately "native" to the Mac platform.

 

This is what I've come up with so far:

 

Build a Python and NIB-based application similar to the OpenGLDemo
application found in PyOpenGL. Basically, we construct a NIB and a
driver module that doesn't do a whole lot more than instantiate an
NSOpenGLView.  The startup Python code for the app creates that window
and has a bunch of handlers in place for all the user and window events.
The aglContext object is retrieved from the NSOpenGLView and passed in
to the C++ code for use in rendering.  The handlers dispatch their
various events as needed within the application structure. In most
cases, they will be able to stay in python, but in some cases (resize,
for example) the information will have to get passed in to the C++ code.

 

A few questions:

 

a)     Is this a reasonable architecture? Please understand that
rewriting our entire application to be more "Mac-ish" is not an option
in this release. 

b)     The intent is to create a single application that will run on as
wide a range of OS X machines as possible. We've been developing on 10.3
and messing about with 10.4, and that's cool, but first blush seems to
indicate that supporting 10.2 is much more problematic than 10.3. Am I
correct about that? How much work is it to support both? Is it worth the
trouble? I don't care about developing on 10.2, only about delivering on
it.

c)     PyOpenGL seems to be constructing a menu that says things like
"CocoaGL". I don't know how to change it, and it's not obvious from the
combination of the demo app and the documentation I've managed to absorb
to date.

 

I'm sure I can come up with a ton of questions, but this seems to be one
of those situations where you kind of need to know it all to know any of
it. I don't yet know which questions are stupid ones, so please bear
with me.

 

Thanks,

 

             Kent

 

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