Pete Ryland's Web Log

EGG [] (22:26)

Well, I've not done any major gtk programming for some time, and certainly not much gtk stuff in python, so I thought I'd see where that was at, and was quite dissappointed. Last time I looked, the documentation was pretty sparse, and pygtk was not much more than a swigging of libgtk. Now, well, it hasn't really improved a lot. It's up to date with the latest gtk and gnome versions at least and has improved the way gtk objects are mapped, but the documentation is still pretty lame, and the few tutorials I've found have been more about using glade than getting dirty with pygtk and pygnome. And quite right, too, it really does feel like a C API, which basically defeats the purpose of using python -- I may as well just code in C! The #gnome channel on gimpnet wasn't much help either, unfortunately, suggesting that people were moving away from this API.

So, I've decided to take on the challange of writing a more pythonic higher-level API for gtk, building on pygtk and pygnome (and their hard work) using more pythonesque features, including some newer ones such as decorators. The intention is to create an API that is primarily easy to use, so will do things like allow gui objects to be provided automatically by simply decorating a method with the appropriate wrapper, and provide sensible, working defaults to enable users to get something working quickly, a bit like scaffolding in RoR.

First things first then, the name. After not too much thought, I came up with EGG, Easy Gnome Gubbins. So there we have it. Expect to see some more about this in the very near future!

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