Pyjs: a Rich Internet Application Development Platform for both Web and Desktop. | Hacker News Reader

Pyjs: a Rich Internet Application Development Platform for both Web and Desktop.

pyjs.org

37 pointsColinWright10 comments

I want to learn more about this, but (ironically), when I go to the "I don't get it" section and click on link " Will and Abe come to the rescue, with their Guide to Pyjs"... it comes up 404. And clicking on the FAQ link doesn't help someone get it either... I guess I still don't get it?

I looked into Pyjs a while ago. I’m sure there is some exciting parts in there. I would love to see the Python-JS compiler as a stand alone module. But on a whole this sort of abstraction seems not fit for creating contemporary web apps: it’s way too leaky.

If you’re generating HTML, CSS and JavaScript from Python, that means Pyjs will have to make a lot of decisions on how to implement front-end functionality, decisions that are usually left to front-end developers/designers.

This means it will be very difficult for the Pyjs coder to collaborate with these developers/designers. And you need them, because fine-tuning the interaction design, the look and feel, is crucial for the success of a web app.

In Chromium recent-ish on Ubuntu 12.04:

http://pyjs.org/examples/CanvasProcessing.html

"Note that this is an example of using processing.js. See http://ejohn.org/blog/processingjs/ for more info. Since processing.js is built for state-of-the-art browser that properly implement canvas, IE is not supported."

Yet:

http://pyjs.org/examples/BrowserDetect.html

Safari detected. This is the Safari version of the application.

So this is part of Pyjamas, which has been around for quite awhile. However, seems 2012 has been interesting. From the Wikipedia entry:

On May 2 2012 the leadership roles of the project came into question [8]. Prior to May 2 2012 Leighton acted as project lead, and operated the project according to free software principles. After taking control of the pyjs.org domain name and copying the mailing list data without members' permission, a group of developers critical of the leadership methods of Leighton effectively outed him from his role by transferring the project to non-free resources. Talks were held with the Python Software Foundation to have the project transferred to and run by the PSF, but the talks stalled after the PSF learned that, in direct violation of the UK Data Protection Act 1998, the mailing list data had been copied without Leighton's permission or knowledge, and without the consent of or consultation with any of its members. The pyjamas project is the first Free Software Project ever to have been hijacked, rather than forked.

not be nitpicky but...

", the AJAX library takes care of all the browser interoperability issues on your behalf"

why would xhtmlrequests be fixing browser incompatibilities?

:s/AJAX/HTML5

I think PYJS dates back to the days when AJAX was a term that was misused in a similar way that HTML5 is now.

Evidenced by the phrase, "Rich Internet Application" :)

You used to need to do different things for AJAX depending on browser version. My guess is that's what they're referring to. For example, older versions of Internet Explorer used "ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")" instead of "XMLHttpRequest".

See: http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/ajax_xmlhttprequest_create.asp

This might be a stupid question but; Is this the same concept as http://appjs.org or http://cappuccino.org ?

ps http://pyjs.org/will_and_abe_guide_to_pyjamas.html 404's ds

I don't think so; it seems to me that it's the opposite of appjs. The tagline of appjs is:

> Build Desktop Applications for Linux, Windows and Mac using HTML, CSS and Javascript

Pyjs is python->javascript/html/css compiler; it started as a port of GWT:

> Pyjs started life as a Python port of Google Web Toolkit, the Java-to-JavaScript compiler.

Basically, it allows you to use Python to write both web and desktop applications; abstracting out the css, javascript, and html.

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