Thanks for your experienced guidance Bob,
In retrospect, I guess my limited and naive exposure thus far has yielded up as many "annoyances" in 2.3 as in 2.4, so it was unfair diminishing the state of 2.4. Also, the new (to me) considerations regarding pygame and wxPython are applicable to both versions I'm sure. Is there some middle ground approach I might use for Mac OS X only development and deployment? The multimedia development I do goes beyond reasonable expectations with Director and Lingo scripting (and I have considerable experience there).
One response mentioned how they were using Python and PyQT. My response might give a better idea of my mindset:
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My goal is to accomplish what I want to with Python and its components and I'm still naive enough to think I might be able to without undo hassle :~)
I, of course, am not under any commercial pressure anymore and would not take on any occasional client project without doing feasibility testing of applicable functionality first.
In my "working" career I was (among other things) involved in engineering modeling systems that are I'm sure quite outdated by now. The point being that such started with assembler and evolved through Fortran, APL, Pascal and C (first on IBM then HP Unix distributed systems) - areas I have no desire to get back into. The other areas were business applications with COBOL and flash-in-the pants higher level tools that is even more unappealing anymore.
The upstart is that there are still a lot of different ideas I'd like to develop (in the sense of keeping my head busy) especially on the new Mac, but don't want to get off on too many troublesome tangents ;') I imagine though, that in holding down the size of executables some of the Python "components" will involve compile steps. What ever happened to my "perfect world" dreams :<))
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Thanks yet again Bob, Lee C
On Apr 5, 2005, at 2:13 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
On Apr 5, 2005, at 8:20 AM, Lee Cullens wrote:
What is a good working environment?
All of what Bob did for us is nice for exploring changes in 2.4 but is still too much of a WIP. I (as many of you) need to get on with some development work though and was wondering what basis to work from.
No, it's not a WIP. Python 2.4.1 is perfectly stable (FAR more so than 2.3.0, actually). Except for packages that I don't package myself, namely wxPython and matplotlib, everything in the pythonmac.org repository should also be available for Python 2.4.
Also, I stopped using Python 2.3 after I built the 2.4.1 installer, so any packages built from here on out for 2.3 will be largely untested. I only build them as a convenience, because it's very little additional effort for me to do. Of course, nothing in the repository has any guarantee, but most of the stuff in there I use, so it can be considered tested -- but only for Python 2.4 (unless it has been in there a while).
Mostly what I will be doing is prototyping components of larger systems (and then maybe convincing them they can't do it any better than with Python :)), and multimedia presentations (beyond Director) that include animation (2d and 3D) and reinforcing gaming (word puzzels, image puzzles, and combinations).
pygame + pyOpenGL may very well be the best solution for this. It's much simpler to understand than wxPython, and it's cross-platform. The downsides are that there is no widget set, it can not integrate with one (in a sane cross-platform manner), and you are limited to one window. Both of these packages are available for Python 2.4.
What I want to do for myself I'm content with doing only for Mac OS X (10.3.8+) and may deliver some via the web. However, what little I do for corporate clients anymore (don't want to get bogged down in work work) they still seem to want for MS Windows :( dislike that platform).
Anyway, since all the components aren't there yet for Python 2.4 (and what are seem to be less than production quality), I'm assuming that at least 2.3 is solid enough (relatively speaking :). At least all the components are there (with the caveat of what was recently discussed regarding overall coordination and quality control). I'm also assuming that with the state of Python, Tiger will probably not go beyond 2.3 (not asking you to make any frowned upon predictions).
Python 2.4.1 *is* production quality. All of the packages that I have built for 2.4.1 work exactly the same as they do on 2.3, but faster and with less bugs. The Python 2.3.0 interpreter that ships with Mac OS X 10.3 is *almost* production quality. The fact that the distribution I built didn't include a help book (which was apparently built by hand, and made available separately) really has no relevance at all to its "production quality".
I *highly* recommend that you use Python 2.4.
So to look as well as possible on the Mac I should use what graphics components? Then for MS Windows candidates (cross-platform) I should use wxPython for graphics components? I *have* been perusing the components list (http://pythonmac.org/packages/) and brief descriptions, but only a limited amount of the detailed documentation so far. One point about the component list - I should use only the component versions flagged for py2.3 if such is to be my production platform? (Dumb questions sometimes yield surprising answers)
I'd recommend pygame first, unless you have some requirements that it can't handle.
Another very novice question - for the MS Windows executables do I need to transfer my script packages to my clunky old PC and construct such there, or can py2exe construct such on my Mac?
Neither cx_Freeze nor py2exe make it reasonable to "cross-compile" like this. You will have to use Windows.
-bob
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