Python + XUL = GUI Nirvana
It’s been a busy time since my last post with End-Of-Financial-Year for myself and my clients (I wont bore you with the details) as well as keeping pace with the bleeding edge technologies I’ve chosen to use in this project.
Early in June I came across this interesting piece on the Twisted-web developers list.
G’day,
I just thought that I would make a little project announcement about something I’ve been tinkering with for the past week or two.
NuFox is a server-side XUL toolkit written on top of Nevow. It uses a customised stan dialect with XML namespace support as well as livepage (nevow svn head version), and then abstracts that all away into a more python-gui-toolkit-like API.Its very early in development but its already pretty powerful in terms of what you can do with it, check it out and play with some of the examples. Feedback is most welcome.
-tjs
I’d just read and realised the importance of this post when it dawned on me that there wasn’t a URL. Ping! It came in the next message so I hurried on over to the Nufox site to see what this was all about and to join the mailing list.
In simple terms Nufox provides a clean syntax for developing windows and forms that can be rendered on any Mozilla (Gecko) based browser. Couple that with E4X support in the latest Mozilla builds and the future looks very promissing.
Thanks to Nevow and NuFox there is a way to design application windows and forms that is easy to read, write and therefore maintain. The Mozilla family of browsers will take care of the client deployment end of the equation.
The current UI sub system stack - from the client end down - looks like this.
The newness of NuFox and Nevow plus the recent E4X additions to Mozilla make for some interesting times ahead as these projects head toward integration and stability. Things are moving pretty fast.
Where to from here?
The next phase is to source the right tools for user/group/role managment, the object store and business rules. There are a few on the short list but nothing stands out as being a winner just yet. If you know of any packages I should look into please let me know by e-mail to uwe at microshare.com.au.