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

sean.upton@uniontrib.com sean.upton@uniontrib.com
Thu, 24 May 2001 12:40:36 -0700


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

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