On Feb 22, 2009, at 4:27 AM, Rasjid Wilcox wrote:

>  This is a serious question.  Why isn't everyone in the Python world
>  using this stuff?  There should be hoards of people here.  XUL / pyDOM
>  is so much better than wxPython, it is just not funny.  This stuff is
>  jaw dropping amazing.

Hi Rasjid,
I think PyXPCOM suffers foremost from a lack of critical mass. In  
other words, not enough developers use it. As a result, bugs don't get  
discovered and fixed as fast as they might, community support is weak,  
the documentation has holes, etc. Don't get me wrong; I don't mean to  
imply indifference or laziness on the part of any of the developers or  
the community. All open source projects suffer from the things I  
mentioned above to some extent. But the most popular projects usually  
suffer the least.

Lack of critical mass is a chicken-and-egg problem. Do people not use  
it because they try it and don't like it, or do they not know about  
it, or do they avoid it because the well-traveled road is often the  
least risky if not always the most comfortable? I don't know the  
answer here.

I like PyXPCOM and felt it was powerful once I got things assembled  
correctly. But I can think of a few off-putting experiences that I had.

On the project in which I was involved, we spent a fair amount of time  
developing an install that would work within an OS X Framework bundle.  
After we got that done, we had to work on Windows. Neither was  
trivial. That was a frustrating point. Every minute we spent doing  
that was a minute spent *not* developing our app.

Our install was going to be a huge heavy thing, bundling a large chunk  
of Mozilla and a complete Python alongside PyXPCOM.

Components can't be new-style classes (i.e. inherit from object). This  
isn't a show-stopper, but it is annoying. It's also not that easy to  
discover as the related errors are cryptic. I burned some time  
debugging that.

I haven't used wxPython TkInter, PyJamas, PyQt, etc. and they might  
have similar quirks. They are probably (except for perhaps PyJamas)  
better supported, and once again I mean that as no knock on the  
PyXPCOM developers & community. It's just a matter of popularity.

I wish you the best and hope you write the killer app that makes  
everyone notice PyXPCOM. It'd be nice to see it get more traction and  
build a big user base.


>  I had been playing with it in spare moments for a couple of months,
>  but after using it for one week in earnest, I don't ever what to go
>  back to anything else.  And combining this with SqlAlchemy gives a
>  killer platform for database development.  I just need to find (or
>  create in XBL) a good data-grid control [1].

Check out the treeview control.



Cheers
Philip
_______________________________________________
pyxpcom mailing list
pyxpcom@[...].com
To unsubscribe: http://listserv.ActiveState.com/mailman/mysubs