Pyjamas: writing AJAX applications in Python

yehhh, it's tricky to cover a comprehensive topic, and often it's interactive discussion that works better for some (hellooo :)

"Well, actually quite a bit of money is spent on the support..."

oh dear! try http://siriusit.co.uk they actually employ or have contacts with many of the developers who work on products that their customers deploy, such as postgresql, kde, samba etc. unfortunately, with google's policy of employing many of the worlds' top free software developers (so that nobody else can) it's a quite a hard trick for any support company to pull off.

"you should be grateful that google released GWT as free software

I don't feel like, because I hope I never have to use it, neither as a developer or a user. Web-based UIs (in my experience) suck, regardless of the technology behind them. "

*rueful smile* you're not the only person to be utterly disillusioned with web-based UI development. this is one of the reasons why i risked creating and emphasising pyjamas-desktop, because by going "direct" to the DOM model and cutting out the javascript, one of the main painful psychological barriers (javascript) is lifted.

the skills list required to do decent web-based user interfaces is just absolutely horrendous. i listed them only last week: http://advogato.org/person/lkcl/diary/623.html - many people simply cannot cope with this, in order to create the level of UI interaction experience that web users expect these days.

anyway - it's particularly interesting to note that john resig, an experienced javascript developer, criticises pyjamas from a different angle: one of not being "direct" enough. but the thing is, the whole point of the pyjamas UI API is to solve and encode as many of the quirks and the bits of expertise as possible behind a common API so that _you_ don't have to know them. [that's the job of AJAX frameworks: it's just that pyjamas is written (mostly) in python, not javascript]

both GWT and Pyjamas do that: one for java developers, one for python developers. (there's also RWT (RubyJS) but its development stopped in 2007 unfortunately).

the point is: myself and many others have been just as exasperated and disillusioned as you, with web UI development (i vowed once that i would never do javascript programming, now i'm doing the complete opposite!) and both GWT and Pyjamas tackle UI development with less emphasis on "web", more emphasis on "desktop-widget-like", and thus allow us to carry on, keep abreast of current user expectations, not give up and not go bananas with stress either :)