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In praise of PythonCard

Tim Butterfield timbutterfield at mindspring.com
Sat Apr 19 19:08:04 EDT 2003 
Ron Stephens wrote:
 > Still, I want to point out what a good time I am having with <a
 > href = "http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/">PythonCard</a> as an
 > easy gui-builder for Python scripts.

Thanks for the good intro. :)

Yesterday, I was reading an LWN Daily posting about All-American 
(division of Mayflower Transit) and their move to Linux.  This got me 
thinking (again) about an aspect of Linux that may be making it more 
difficult for some companies to make a similar move.

Linux is is not really an easy target for developing applications. 
That is not to say it is hard.  It can just be more time consuming 
than developing a similar app for Windows.  One thing that is missing 
from the Linux development mainstream is a good development 
environment.  Emacs and vi are great for editing code, but are not as 
good for laying out a gui.  As much as some people dismiss them, 
language based IDEs like VB and Delphi made development of Windows 
applications less time consuming.  Borland's Kylix may try to do 
something similar for Linux, but so far, I haven't seen widespread 
acceptance of it.

Perhaps you can guess where I am going with this.  Python is a very 
useful language, as I am sure most of you will agree.  However, even 
though it supports GUI development, it is not yet a rapid process.

Let me digress here just a bit.  If it could continue supporting what 
it already does, how would people feel if python were to be the next 
VB?  The language has the potential for it.  The cross platform nature 
of wxPython doesn't hurt either.

When looking for a similar development environment, PythonCard seems 
to come the closest so far with the property editors and resouce 
files.  What I envision is an IDE for python similar to VB and Delphi 
(PyDE?) that allows for those property editors and resource files to 
be integrated into an editor/debugger and builder.  Of course, being 
able to add custom widgets and tie in data support to those widgets 
would be needed.  Is such a thing desired?

--
Tim Butterfield
http://www.timbutterfield.com/
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