PyObjC News
The PyObjC CVS repository has had a series of significant commits over the past few weeks. If you are using or considering PyObjC on Panther, I would highly recommend working with the latest from CVS. PyObjC has an extensive set of unit tests and a development team that is very good about running the tests before committing. As such, the latest CVS is generally very stable with the rare bit of blood loss.
Specifically:
A series of commits from Bob Ippolito and Ronald Oussoren have made it much less painful to use PyObjC with Distributed Objects, NSProxy, and in threaded environments. It worked before, but barely and inneffeciently. Now it is relatively stable. If this sounds a bit non-commital, it is because in-process DO, threading and use of NSProxy are all hard to get right, regardless of language of implementation. The word “easy” and the words “just works” does not belong here.
Donovan Preston has been actively working on the Xcode project template. It now uses Bob’s main.m and, as such, should work with any dynamic library or framework install of Python on OS X. Better yet, it does so automatically. Bob’s code also provides significantly better error handling during the startup phase of PyObjC based apps.
Finally, I am continuing to add PyObjC hacques to my Subversion repository. As well, ReSTedit continues to evolve and will be getting some pretty neat features fairly soon (I hope).
Overall, I have to say I’m incredibly impressed and proud of PyObjC. It isn’t mine, per se, but I do feel a bit of ownership from simply having been involved on the project for so long. It has come a long, long way since 1994 (I wish I knew the original date it came into existance — as it stands, I’m going to call WWDC the arbitrary 10 year anniversary of PyObjC).