RE: [Zope] Prerequisites for a desktop IDE, or any desktop app w/ Zope
As a former VCL and OWL programmer, I have a bit of an affinity towards that way of doing things; the catch is of course, given I mainly do server-side development now (and frankly, it makes no sense to do non-client development in non-open tools, for the most part), I don't have the interest, or the money to keep paying Borland for upgrades every time the release a new version of Kylix/Delphi/Whatever; I stopped playing that game at about BCPP 3 after going from TP1.5->Delphi2->BCPP 3. I could only afford the decent versions of those tools when I was a student and had access to academic pricing at the campus bookstore, and now that I don't I do work in free tools, and get more satisfaction out of it. Kylix still has too high of a barrier to entry for most developers to even be considered for any open-source development. wxPython has definitely rekindled my interest in doing some desktop development, with the idea that Zope would provide a good middleware suite / backend for those kind of apps. I can't wait to see what the Boa-Constructor people have been doing... If I could get the ability to have a tool like Delphi, et al and be able to code in Python, and use Zope as an object brokering system for a backend - and have it all free - I would be very willing to give up sleeping and eating just to code more ;) Sean -----Original Message----- From: Christian Tismer [mailto:tismer@tismer.com] Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 11:35 AM To: Michel Pelletier Cc: sean.upton@uniontrib.com; zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Prerequisites for a desktop IDE, or any desktop app w/Zope Michel Pelletier wrote: ...
I'm currently doing a bit of playing around with wxPython, which reminds me a lot of my days programming with the Borland OWL class libraries, so I might be partial to such a solution using wxPython instead of tkinter (tcl interpreter - blech! motif-style widgets - yuck!). An IDE built with a decent (modern) widget set / UI class library, with extended toolkit functions, like data-bound controls, might make for an interesting user-extensible means of creating custom-tweaked IDEs, not to mention other desktop software that accesses Zope...
wxPython is indeed very cool.
Kylix would probably be even cooler. Unfortunately Kylix is no free software.
In addition to an IDE, I want to be able to have some good guidelines and documentation for standardized UML in Zope, so that when I share designs with colleagues, I don't have to use a ridiculous amount of my own flavor of stereotypes, just because I don't know any better. Once I have that, I want CASE->CODE->CASE tools with an existing tool (even if it is a Visio extension hacked with VBscript),
blech. it would take you just as long to hack one up with xwPython and have a real object model underneath and it would be x-platform.
Do you think Delphi/Kylix is considerable? At the moment, I'm considering this for a GUI for FreePM. I had some very good experience with PythonForDelphi, it integrates very well with Python. You have both worlds: Python's scripting power, and Delphi with its IDE. Doing the same thing under Linux using Kylix might be a promising path. ciao - chris -- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@tismer.com> Mission Impossible 5oftware : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Kaunstr. 26 : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14163 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/ PGP Fingerprint E182 71C7 1A9D 66E9 9D15 D3CC D4D7 93E2 1FAE F6DF where do you want to jump today? http://www.stackless.com/
sean.upton@uniontrib.com wrote:
As a former VCL and OWL programmer, I have a bit of an affinity towards that way of doing things; the catch is of course, given I mainly do server-side development now (and frankly, it makes no sense to do non-client development in non-open tools, for the most part), I don't have the interest, or the money to keep paying Borland for upgrades every time the release a new version of Kylix/Delphi/Whatever; I stopped playing that game at about BCPP 3 after going from TP1.5->Delphi2->BCPP 3. I could only afford the decent versions of those tools when I was a student and had access to academic pricing at the campus bookstore, and now that I don't I do work in free tools, and get more satisfaction out of it. Kylix still has too high of a barrier to entry for most developers to even be considered for any open-source development.
I see your point, partially. But is the problem with server-side development? I wouldn't consider to do anything in Kylix on the server side. We are talking abount a GUI, which is the only reason to move away from Python at all. What I'm thinking of is: We can build a generic application using Kylix or Delphi, which has all the components in it, which are needed so far. They could be made higly configurable, and finally, that Kylix app would be like a toolkit, like wxPython is. It would be compiled once, and the executable would be freely available. Applications for this tool would then we written in Python, completely. It would configure that generic app. With this cheap trick, Kylix would be turned into a generic GUI builder tool, at no cost.
wxPython has definitely rekindled my interest in doing some desktop development, with the idea that Zope would provide a good middleware suite / backend for those kind of apps. I can't wait to see what the Boa-Constructor people have been doing...
If I could get the ability to have a tool like Delphi, et al and be able to code in Python, and use Zope as an object brokering system for a backend - and have it all free - I would be very willing to give up sleeping and eating just to code more ;)
My proposal is to use Delphi, and build a tool with it which is like Delphi. The task would be just to write such an app, not too hard probably. Delphi is written in itself, as you know. I have already written some generic application with about 20 generic widgets, which are all configurable at runtime. And Delphi is able to produce .dfm files at runtime and to read them back in. It is so self-contained that it is somehow waiting to be stolen as a generic app framework. I'm wondering why nobody does it. Maybe I should do this now. ciao - chris -- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@tismer.com> Mission Impossible 5oftware : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Kaunstr. 26 : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14163 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/ PGP Fingerprint E182 71C7 1A9D 66E9 9D15 D3CC D4D7 93E2 1FAE F6DF where do you want to jump today? http://www.stackless.com/
Christian Tismer wrote: ...
My proposal is to use Delphi, and build a tool with it which is like Delphi. The task would be just to write such an app, not too hard probably. Delphi is written in itself, as you know. I have already written some generic application with about 20 generic widgets, which are all configurable at runtime. And Delphi is able to produce .dfm files at runtime and to read them back in. It is so self-contained that it is somehow waiting to be stolen as a generic app framework. I'm wondering why nobody does it.
Maybe I should do this now.
Errhmm, can it be that exactly this is forbidden by Inprise? I somehow remember that I've read some statement that I may not use Delphi to code a Delphi-like IDE. Did I dream, or is it true? anxiously - chris -- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@tismer.com> Mission Impossible 5oftware : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Kaunstr. 26 : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14163 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/ PGP Fingerprint E182 71C7 1A9D 66E9 9D15 D3CC D4D7 93E2 1FAE F6DF where do you want to jump today? http://www.stackless.com/
That was a long time ago. They had something in their contract which said that, and the reason you remember it was that there was a bit of a hullabaloo among the Delphi developers. Borland rethought it and decided it wasn't really necessary, and when they announced it at the conference everyone cheered. But since then (and it was several years ago) no one that I know of has created such an IDE, so I think it was a pretty safe decision. I've cc'ed my friend Marco Cantu who might have some other input or ideas about this. He knows Delphi better than anyone I know. With Kylix, you could have a nice cross-platform solution. *********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** On 5/25/01 at 12:20 AM Christian Tismer wrote:
Christian Tismer wrote: ...
My proposal is to use Delphi, and build a tool with it which is like Delphi. The task would be just to write such an app, not too hard probably. Delphi is written in itself, as you know. I have already written some generic application with about 20 generic widgets, which are all configurable at runtime. And Delphi is able to produce .dfm files at runtime and to read them back in. It is so self-contained that it is somehow waiting to be stolen as a generic app framework. I'm wondering why nobody does it.
Maybe I should do this now.
Errhmm, can it be that exactly this is forbidden by Inprise? I somehow remember that I've read some statement that I may not use Delphi to code a Delphi-like IDE. Did I dream, or is it true?
anxiously - chris
-- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@tismer.com> Mission Impossible 5oftware : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Kaunstr. 26 : *Starship* http://starship.python.net/ 14163 Berlin : PGP key -> http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/ PGP Fingerprint E182 71C7 1A9D 66E9 9D15 D3CC D4D7 93E2 1FAE F6DF where do you want to jump today? http://www.stackless.com/
_______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
Most current information can be found at: http://www.mindview.net/Etc/notes.html =================== Bruce Eckel http://www.BruceEckel.com Contains free electronic books: "Thinking in Java 2e" & "Thinking in C++ 2e" Please subscribe to my free newsletter -- just send any email to: join-eckel-oo-programming@earth.lyris.net My schedule can be found at: http://www.mindview.net/Calendar ===================
Bruce (and others),
Borland rethought it and decided it wasn't really necessary,
But then they slowly dropped form the source code some of the design time units, and now Delphi doesn't allows you to use portions of its IDE in a stand-alone application, which is quite reasonable.
And Delphi is able to produce .dfm files at runtime and to read them back in.
I think there is also an open and free dfm to XMl converter around.
It is so self-contained that it is somehow waiting to be stolen as a generic app framework.
See above. I can also check the license, but I don't think there is any reference... --- -Marco Cantu' (Wintech Italia Srl) US: marco@marcocantu.com - http://www.marcocantu.com IT: marco@marcocantu.it - http://www.marcocantu.it
participants (4)
-
Bruce Eckel -
Christian Tismer -
Marco Cantu' -
sean.upton＠uniontrib.com