[wingide-users] requested features survey

On Sun, 20 Jan 2002, Steven D. Arnold wrote:
> If I could modify a function inline in Wing, and then see immediately
> what the output would look like without having to restart the
> debugger, that would be cool.

We've had a number of requests for this sort of thing and want to look
into doing something along these lines.  It's not easy to do because you
can't just edit code or reload modules randomly in a running Python
process without consequences.  We might be able to regenerate and replace
specific code objects on the fly for edited functions/methods without
reloading modules.  But some of this might be complicated by the need
to find all the points of reference to a code object and replace them.
And I suspect users will have to know a fair amount about Python internals
to avoid getting into trouble.

Well, suffice it to say we're looking at this but it's not an easy task.
We might end up offering some sort of testing bench that lets you do this
in a more controlled environment.

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On the GUI builder:  We haven't yet made any choices at all for this.
Thanks for the tips on XUL.  We also have our eye on anygui and similar
things.

I think whatever technology we use, the important requirement is that it's
really simple to get started with but has some depth in that it doesn't do
dumb things like force you to mix back end code with gui code, and such
(but also doesn't bother you about this if you don't care).

I personally have also found it easier to write pygtk code directly
because it's so darn simple and clean.  So I think it's a requirement that
the builder can output clean code you can modify, if e.g. you just want to
build something initially but not use the builder later to modify it...
and of course also that you can go the other way and use the builder
exclusively.

It's also a non-trivial design task but the bottom line is that, if
possible, we want to support both simple use and people wanting to do
deeper architecting and/or manual overrides of the gui builder.

--------------------------

Incidentally, we recently contributed back our patches for win32gtk
so that should be improving in a number of ways as Tor Lilqvist merges
that into the gnome CVS repository.  Our version is also available at
ftp://wingide.com/pub/win32gtk .

I'm not sure we'll use this in the gui builder (we'ld like to be
kit-independent, really) but I'm hoping more people will see gtk as a
viable portability layer in the future.

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions!

- Stephan