[Zope] Prerequisites for a desktop IDE, or any desktop app w/ Zope

[Christian Tismer]

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

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