RE: python-loader

["eric jones" <eric enthought com>]

Hey John,

> > > thanks Jody -- recompiled with bonobo and now have the console :)
> > > Now to find out what i can do with it.
> >
> > I'd be interested to know too :-)
>
> Things are going along well so far.
>
> I've managed to write a couple of python snippets to read and write
> ranges of data to/from the sheet, so basically I'm up and running.
>
> I optimistically did 'import wxPython.wx' in the console and was
> rewarded with a core dump (not really surprised by that -- wx was
> probably a bit surprised to find large parts of gtk already up and
> running :).
>
> Finding a way to get wx running is a key step to being able to use
chaco
> for plotting.  I've got a couple of tricks i can try, at least one of
> them should work.  Failing that we can look at creating a pygtk Gui
for
> chaco (suspect it should be easy to convert wxpython to pygtk).

Writing a GTK backend for Chaco is another route here.  Currently, you'd
need to implement 6-10 device specific methods for drawing lines,
setting fonts, etc.  However, we are moving toward doing all the
rendering with the anti-grain library and freetype for bitmap based
displays.  This will mean that all you need for basic support of Chaco
is to write the blit method to get images from our buffer into the GTK
display.  

For interactivity (which you want), you'd also have to write a the GTK
code for building the "traits" dialog boxes (probably about 1500 lines
of python code) and the plot interactivity stuff (another 1500 lines or
so).

This anti-grain based work is going well.  We have the first cut of this
backend.  It can render anti-aliased plots with transparency, etc.  This
is nice because the wxPython backend will not handle this sort of thing
in its current form.  When we switch it over to the anti-grain backend
it'll get these capabilities.  We're currently working on optimization
issues with the text rendering.

see ya,
eric