Would your organization be interested in an nCurses-based, Python emulation of wxWidgets/ WxPython.
While it is still under development, it demonstrates the feasibility of building a high level,
graphical-style user interface upon the low level, nCurses API.
Attached is a sample screen shot on a virtual machine running OpenSolaris.
Summary of Capabilities and limitations
- Supports typical nCurses platforms with xterm_color, vt100 and vt220.
- Untested support for xterm_256color.
- Maps 88-color, wxPython palette into the available nCurses palette.
- Maps pixel dimensions into nCurses character cell units.
- Event handling is rudimentary suitable for button use.
- Queued event processing is not yet designed.
- Panel layer processing is under development.
- User input processing is under development.
Below, is a more detailed summary of my accomplishments.
Dick Gordon
These are details of my accomplishments.
1. Developed, enhanced and maintained a library of general-purpose,
re-usable building block modules for embedded systems. The
building blocks:
a) Provides both Command Line and Graphical-style User Interfaces
that enable application developers to focus on the application
specific functionality and not waste effort re-inventing the
functionality typical of Command Line and Graphical User
Interfaces.
b) Can operate in an isolated system (Stand-Alone mode) or in a
networked system (Stand-Among mode).
c) Are implemented in Python 2.x.
d) Are ported to Python 3.x using a Python program (2to3) which
reads Python 2.x source code and apply a series of fixers to
transform it into valid Python 3.x code.
2. Cross-platform designs run, without change, on Linux, Mac
OS X and Microsoft Windows (the latter requires Cygwin, a
Linux-like environment add-on from Red Hat).
3. Command Line Interface includes building blocks that create a
sophisticated POSIX-/ Unix-like terminal interface. It features:
a) Command line keyword option and positional argument parsing;
b) Error/exception handling;
c) Event logging to application designated terminals, files or
devices (stderr, stdout, syslog, stdscr);
d) Launching, event dispatching and terminating of the
Graphical-style User Interface;
e) Wrapper used to ensure that each application terminates with
the exit code and message appropriate for co-ordination of a
sequence of multiple applications.
f) Tool to scan an operator designated directory tree and strip
lines of source code of any superfluous trailing blank
characters;
g) Tool to scan an operator designated directory tree and report
on the total number of files, total number of lines of code,
total number of blank/comment lines and their distribution
among the file name extensions associated with various
programming language such as Ada, Assembler, C/C++, Fortran,
Pascal, Python and shell script.
4. Graphical-style User Interface includes building blocks that
create a sophisticated Desktop, Laptop and Workstation Computer-
like terminal interface. Using the "nCurses" character-mode and
xterm libraries of the host platform, it emulates a subset of
the "wxPython" pixel-mode Graphical User Interface. This enables
"wxPython" applications to run with little, if any, change if
they neither use icons nor other bit-mapped images, nor use
proportional sized fonts or associated special features. The
emulation features the following widgets:
a) Tiled (side-by-side) and overlapped (partially hidden) windows;
b) Frames / Dialogs (top-level windows) containing other widgets;
c) Menu bars (placeholder windows) containing drop down menus
(windows);
d) Tool bars (windows) containing a collection of windows for
on-screen buttons, menus, or other input or output widgets;
e) Status bars (windows) containing an information window, at
the bottom of a top-level window, sometimes divided into
sections, each of which shows different information);
f) Task bar (a top-level window) containing windows for buttons
used to control which top-level window has focus and is not
partially hidden;
g) Sizers (non-windows) containing sizers or windows for tables
of data or buttons;
h) Panels (windows) containing sizers or windows;
i) Buttons (windows) for operator control action triggers,
j) Check boxes (windows) containing buttons for enabling/
disabling any one or combination of several operator mode
and option control action triggers;
k) Radio boxes (windows) containing Radio buttons for choice of one
of several operator mode and option control action triggers;
l) Gauges (windows) for horizontal and vertical bar graph widgets;
m) Scrolled windows (windows) containing a scrollable text window
and horizontal and/or vertical scroll bars (each with
associated scroll position gauge and scroll control buttons
(up, down, left, right) for action triggers;
n) Redirected output (a top-level window or log file) containing
system and application messages annotated with date, time and
event severity levels that are printed or sent to syslog,
stderr, stdout or scrolled windows;
o) Splash screen (pre-recorded image) that notifies the operator that the
program is in the lengthy process of loading