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000000_icon-group-sender _Wed Jul 5 08:05:23 2000.msg
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2001-01-03
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by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id IAA24721
for icon-group-addresses; Wed, 5 Jul 2000 08:05:15 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200007051505.IAA24721@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
From: "Mark Evans" <evans@unbounded.com>
To: <icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU>
Subject: A better GUI for the next generation
Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2000 14:29:17 -0500
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Dear Iconeers,
The Visual Interface Builder (VIB) has never been more than a toy. This note is
a public encouragement to the Icon and Unicon development teams to drop the
current VIB and consider another approach.
The inspiration for this idea is the awesome wxPython.
http://www.wxPython.org
http://www.Python.org
Python is an open-source interpretive script language with roots in Modula-3 and
borrowings from Icon, Lisp, and C++ (plus a byte-code execution model like
Java). Many consider it the best interpreted language and it has a wide
following. It is running some real-world web pages for example. It is
object-oriented and scalable.
Now the "wx" in wxPython comes from the wxWindows cross-platform C++ GUI
library. So "wxPython" is not a variant of Python, which is standardized; it is
a set of Python-language wrapper classes for the wxWindows C++ library. In
effect it marries the best of both worlds. You get the ease of Python with the
efficiency of C++ for GUI development. The wxPython library is a set of Python
classes that essentially mirror the underlying C++ classes in wxWindows.
You must run the wxPython demo to understand the power and ease of this GUI
tool. The demo offers a list of GUI displays with corresponding wxPython code
available in a separate tab frame. One of the most impressive demos is a
million-cell spreadsheet.
In many respects wxPython is a lot like Visual Basic in its ease of use, but
without the language problems. It must be said that wxPython lacks a GUI editor
per se. However Python can build stand-alone GUI executables on any platform.
(There is a second cross-platform GUI suite for Python, but wxPython is light
years ahead of it.)
The proposal then is a set of Unicon "wrapper" classes in the spirit of
wxPython. Other people in the open-source world have already done the C++ GUI
development work. Given the limited resources of the Unicon team, I would
suggest leveraging this work and not extending the poor old VIB.
Incidentally it would be nice if Unicon adopted the open source model more
completely. Over at the Python site, I can get daily builds of the current
development version, and its issues are openly discussed by Pythoneers. This is
true open-source. The Icon/Unicon model is open source but not open source
development. There are just a few people working on the language in their spare
time, and that is why it takes so long. Still I look forward to the release of
Unicon!
Best regards,
Mark Evans