Venster

Lectori Salutem,

Venster is a small template library to build GUI windows applications using only pure python and the win32 API. The windows API is called trough the use of Thomas Hellers's excelent ctypes module (http://ctypes.sourceforge.net).

The spirit of these components is about the same as that of the Microsoft ATL and WTL libraries for C++. (e.g. low runtime requirements, toolkit style, no doc/view paradigms etc).

It is still my believe that the best Windows Apps are build using the RAW windows API using only small wrapper libraries such as ATL or WTL.

The goals of this work are:

• make it possible to make good-looking (at least on par with what is possible with C++/WTL/Win32) python based windows applications

• with the least amount of run-time needed. What I mean by this is that a distribution version of such a python windows application would only need the PythonXX.dll and the ctypes dll + the pyc sources of the app itself. If this is not the case than it would not make sense to build this gui lib (just use .NET then, and distribute the 20mb runtime with it (or Java with its 10mb runtime)) So small is really the key here

read INSTALL.TXT for installation instructions, then go to the test folder and try any of the

test_*.py files to see the results sofar.

Grtz,

Henk Punt (henk@entree.nl)

Venster is also made possible by the contributions and suggestions from:

Thomas Heller (theller@python.net) Wim Vree (wim@vree.be) Andrew MacIntyre (andrew.macintyre@aba.gov.au) Brad Clements (bkc@murkworks.com) Dave Brueck (dave@solussoftware.com)