I suppose you are less than impressed with the response to your
mail... So am I. Here is what I know.
> One possibility is to purchase a commercial platform-independent GUI library
> such as Aspect, C++/Views, Galaxy, Zinc, etc, and create a Python interface.
> Has anybody done this?
Well, nobody has told me anybody about it if they did, so I very much
doubt it. Have you thought of Interviews? It's in C++, but Python
mixes reasonably well with that. Or what about XVT (a commercial
stdwin-like package)?
> Another possibility is to find a non-commercial GUI library (hopefully, one
> that is distributed on the same terms as Python), and create a Python interface
> to that. The advantage of this second approach is that the resulting package
> could be made freely distributable, and incorporated into the Python
> distribution. Any leads on this?
Nothing, but a friend just pointed me to a public domain platform
independent programming environment called wxwin, available for xview
(OpenWindows), Motif and MS Windows. The only pointer I have is that
someone found it at the University of Edinburgh...
> Are there any "official" plans to replace stdwin with something better?
The current trend in Python is towards Motif (see below), but that
leaves the Mac and PC users rather in the cold...
> Because we are developing a commercial product, we are committing significant
> manpower to fixing bugs, porting to new platforms*, creating a regression
> test suite, and adding enhancements. I would ideally like to fold these
> changes into the main Python distribution, so that we can benefit from the
> work that other Python developers are doing.
Good idea! If you do make changes to the distribution, please don't
reformat them -- context diffs relative to the latest release have the
highest chances of being folded back.
> By the way, just how much
> Python development activity is going on right now, and by how many people?
I know that several companies are considering Python as a scripting or
extension language for one of their UNIX-based products. I don't know
if they'd all let me mention their names though -- they are reading
the list, so if they want to respond they can do so! Here are a few
that I think are safe to mention:
Sunrise Software have a version of their Motif GUI builder "ezX" which
supports Python as one of the possible scripting languages. They've
demonstrated this last year and I'm an official beta tester...
V.I. Corporation have also invested quite some time in Python already,
they are working on a very nice set of Motif bindings that they will
release under similar conditions as the rest of Python. (While they
were working on this, I did my own set of Motif bindings, which has
somewhat less functionality but is much more robust so far. I hope I
can prevent having two sets of incompatible bindings, so policy is to
release nothing until this is resolved...)
Several others are less far (or tell me less about what they are
doing). There are also several companies who use Python for in-house
projects like automated testing.
Hope this helps...
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>
PS: I'm sure I've seen your name on the net before but can't remember
where or how. Quite possibly we've even exchanged mail log ago. You
must be the author of some kind of famous software. Give me a
clue...?