Python Programming On Win32

Developing a PythonWin Sample Application

During the rest of this section, we will develop a sample application using PythonWin. This will lead us through many of the important MFC and PythonWin concepts, while also leveraging the dynamic nature of PythonWin.

MFC itself has a tutorial/sample called Scribble, which delivers a basic drawing application. We will develop a version of Scribble written in Python.

We will make use of some of the features of PythonWin to demonstrate how rapidly you can create such an application. Specifically, we will develop the Scribble framework first to run under the existing PythonWin framework, then make changes to it so it can run standalone. This is in contrast to the traditional technique of developing MFC applications, where the application object is often one of the first entities defined. A key benefit in using the PythonWin application object is that you get the full benefits of the PythonWin IDE, including error handling and reporting in the interactive window. This makes development much easier before we finally plug in our custom application object.

The general design of the Scribble application is simple. Define the document object to keep a list of strokes. A stroke is the start and end coordinates of a line. The document object also can load and store this list of strokes to a file. A view object is also defined that can render these strokes onto a Window.

The first step in the sample is to provide a placeholder for the document template, ...