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A Python Ate My GUI - Part 3: Implementation

Time to Bootstrap your D3, pick up that Python and hop on the Autobahn

If you aren’t aware of my earlier posts, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this series so that you get some context for this ongoing exercise.

Since I started thinking about and working on these posts, I’ve also been developing the ideas on GitHub as a side project I called sofi.

Sofi is a Python 3 package that serves as the starter implementation of the design discussed in Part 2: a system that will generate the necessary HTML and JavaScript code typically needed to produce a single-page application and serve it up through WebSockets (not an HTTP server).

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A Python Ate My GUI - Part 2: Design

In the first part of this series, we discussed a few existing modules that give us tools for building interfaces. I promised to come back with some ideas on how I would attempt to solve the situation, and this post is intended to cover aspects of my initial design.

However, first I need to discuss one more point on existing modules. In case you’re not aware, PyCon 2016 happened a few wks ago in Portland, and amongst the many wonderful talks, keynotes and open spaces, there was one in particular that is relevant to the topic of our discussion here: Russell Keith Magee’s talk on BeeWare and the work he’s done to solve the same problem. I highly recommend you take a look and help out with his projects if you can. It’s definitely a bold and brave solution that’s highly complex, but he already has it at a usable state and deserves massive props for going down that path. The Podcast.__init__ guys also have a great interview with him going over the details.

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A Python Ate My GUI

Thoughts on the future of Python and graphical interfaces

Staring at my coworkers, already knowing the inevitability of the situation, my eyes roll as the argument starts anew:

“I told you I can write that code twice as fast, in half as many lines and they’ll be cleaner and more readable than yours will ever be! Python is awesome!” — said the one guy.

“Whatever you say, you’ll never be able to make a UI that’s half as good as this. It won’t look pretty and no one will want to use it!” — replied the other — “Probably can’t even make it run on Windows” — he mumbled to himself while walking away.

Some years ago this was a regular exchange between coworkers, and while they were mostly messing around, there was still an element of truth to it. Regardless of its capabilities, Python was mostly known as a “scripting” language — not really for graphical interfaces — and the world was still looking for a native OS feel in their GUI applications, which was not really accessible from Python without a lot of work.

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Sofi - An OS agnostic UI module for Python.

Built to allow rapid, pythonic GUI development using standard web-based widgets from Bootstrap and other common HTML5 libraries and package them in such a way that all event processing is done within python using websockets.