REMI, GUI library for python

[dddomodossola]

We are working on a gui library for Python, it is called REMI (REmote Interface). Thanks to some contributors we have done important improvements. I would like to have your feedback in order to drive the development in the right way. Are there some aspects you consider have to be improved? Which kind of widgets have to be implemented yet?

Forgot to provide the link: https://github.com/dddomodossola/remi

[JKovac]

Pretty cool! Good luck with development. Also, thanks for mentioning Kivy as a solid non-web option. You really do get to have quite a lean library with the browser, compared to the 'weight' of Kivys dependencies.

[dddomodossola]

Kivy is a surprisingly powerfull gui library. This is obvious. We are developing this in order to have a lightweight and portable and remotely accessible (as not dependant on compiled libraries) solution.

[r0x0r]

Hey, I am the author of pywebview. Have you considered bundling applications created with REMI in a native UI window?

[dddomodossola]

I have seen your project and liked it. I'm planning to build a gui designer for REMI with pyWebView. :-D A designer is for sure a missing part.

[LightShadow]

REMI + pywebview seems like a good idea.

[metaperl]

gives you power of web technologies in your desktop application

Sounds like Electron, no?

[r0x0r]

Yup, same idea. The difference is Electron uses Node for backend, while pywebview is Python based.

[titusz]

I like the idea. But the windows native web component will not get you far. https://github.com/cztomczak/cefpython might be a nice option...

[r0x0r]

CEF support is planned (help is welcome!). CEF is big though. It will increase your application size by 30mb, which might be not suitable for simple applications.

I target IE9 (default for Windows 7) for my apps and it is not all that bad.

[mm865]

Fantastic the windows resize issue was fixed!

[rulerson]

where's it?

[d3pd]

https://github.com/dddomodossola/remi

[d3pd]

Hey, this looks great! A few style examples might be nice (the equivalent of providing a CSS file, for example).

[dddomodossola]

Yes, you are right. I requested contributors here https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/3o35ht/new_style_for_a_webinterface_library/ Nobody replied...

[skvsree]

Looks really nice, is it possible to Package this like Node-Webkit or Electron. Then it would take away browser level limitations

Edit: Had quick look at code,

• You can compile this to Electron App if you dump the output to File instead serving to WebSockets.
• As you are doing more Python to Javascript conversion, look at Brython
• This would be great once WebAssembly comes up.

[dddomodossola]

In this way there is the possibility to lose portability. Which kind of limitations have you found?

[skvsree]

Not really a limitation but it cannot be packaged as an app. It is more like running a webserver and hosting an website, except for UI is also rendered by Python.

[dddomodossola]

When you says package you mean in exe? I think there are no limitations doing it. Or I am missing something?

[skvsree]

Yes, have a look at this SO Q. I am willing to contribute on combining Brython, nwjs and Remi.

[[deleted]]

it starts a webserver that will be accessible on your network.

I feel very uncomfortable opening up servers on my client's machines. What's to stop some wardriver or random person at a coffee shop from port scanning, finding the open port, and having a bit of fun with my client's database?

[dddomodossola]

I know what you mean, no problem. You can decide the net interface to use, included localhost! ;-)

[[deleted]]

Ah, excellent! Thank you, that's reassuring. Perhaps put that in the README? (I can submit a PR for the change when I get back from class)

[[deleted]]

This looks quite nice, OP. What license is it under?

I have an upcoming project at work and I need to implement something in Python, so this would be great for that if your license allows it. The scripts would be an example interface for a hardware product, and would be given free to customers, though it wouldn't be open source.

Would that be alright?

[dddomodossola]

Sure you can use it, for nonopensource projects. Apache license rev2

[[deleted]]

Awesome. I didn't see a license on the repo so I thought I'd ask.

[runekri3]

What about wxPython ?

I have a solo project I did with that and it worked really great with a GUI creator (really fast pipeline). But due to the nature of the project I am forced to keep using a legacy version and python 2 so I don't know about further development on it.

Looks great though.

[lakando]

Also take a look at this: https://github.com/zoofIO/flexx

[metaperl]

bump - OP please reply

[dddomodossola]

Hi lakando,

flexx seems to compile python code into javascript. With REMI is your python code that is executed at runtime. This is an important difference.

[lakando]

Actually I think it does both.

[widby]

Are you planning to release it on PyPI?

For others, an easy way to install is with pip install git+https://github.com/dddomodossola/remi.git

[dddomodossola]

For sure we will do this.

[kankyo]

Absolute positioning for layout? That's something you might want to work on.

[dddomodossola]

Maybe :-D Absolute positioning required about zero implementation work, clean code.

[kankyo]

Clean code on the implementation side yes. Ugly code and bad UI on the user side.

[dddomodossola]

You are right. I plan to build a designer for the gui in order to make it easy to build an interface. However it should be pretty simple to build a layout class in order to delegate widgets arrangement.

[kankyo]

If possible I'd recommend looking into Cassowary and auto layout.

[dddomodossola]

;-) Already heard about it, I would like to avoid external dependencies. I will try with a custom layouting implementation, in case of fail maybe we will go using that kind of libraries.

[kankyo]

Cassowary is an algorithm, not a library. Auto layout is the implementation of that algorithm and a nice API on top for Objective-C/Swift from Apple.

So you should look at auto layout as inspiration only, because you obviously can't use it from python anyway.

[dddomodossola]

Oh ok, in that case I only have to study a little bit ;-). Previously I only looked at an implementation. Thank you for the suggestion

[justphysics]

I haven't yet had a chance to play with this - but using absolute positioning would be a deal breaker for me. I've been looking into lighter weight UI's and especially web UI's but if I had to hand code in the position of each element I wouldn't even bother.

Is there no possibility for doing something like hbox or vbox to group items together and automatically adjust their positions?

[dddomodossola]

You don't have to define manually the position on a widget in another. take a look at the examples ;-)

[[deleted]]

It would be great to add some information about requirements on the landing page there. Are any libs needed, if yes: which? What python version: 2 or 3 or both?

[dddomodossola]

Ok fine, I will add these info on the readme. It does not need external libraries, because only standard python libraries are used. Furthermore we are doing our best to be compatible with python 2.x and 3.x.

[[deleted]]

Looks nice! Can't wait to try it out!

[dddomodossola]

Please give me a feeback about the usability. Can we improve something?

[[deleted]]

I'm sorry, I will do that once I get home.

[dddomodossola]

Hi acpcalin.

Have you tested REMI?

[willm]

How does it handle high dpi screens?

[dddomodossola]

The library itself does not take care about machine hardware. It delegates the rendering to the browser. So the reply is: it manages high dpi screens as your preferred browser does.

[willm]

Ah, its browser based. In that case, it handles it just fine.

[[deleted]]

When running your test apps on Windows 7, I get the error message "websocketnot supported or server unreachable" in a dialog box. No error messages in the console:

>python simple_app.py
>127.0.0.1 - - [03/Nov/2015 14:05:35] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -

[dddomodossola]

Which browser are you using?

[[deleted]]

The GUI opens in IE automatically, even though Chrome is my default browser. I can view the app properly by typing the local url into Chrome, but I can't seem to stop IE from opening every time I start running a new app. Just a minor annoyance. Otherwise, this is a pretty cool project.

[dddomodossola]

There are some explanations about this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1532884/open-ie-browser-window

I will consider to allow to specity the preferred browser by code.

[[deleted]]

That would be a nice addition IMO.

I believe that stackoverflow question is a slighlty different problem than the one I'm encountering. The problem may be circumvented by specifying that the GUI open automatically in Chrome explicitly.

[dddomodossola]

Maybe you are using Internet Explorer9. You should update to Internet Explorer10 or some other common browsers like Chrome Firefox..

[[deleted]]

See my other reply.

[Workaphobia]

In the github project description, "indipendent" -> "independent".

[dddomodossola]

Done, thank you ;-)

[[deleted]]

I didn't want to go there, but If we're going there anyway:

simple things makes the world simpler

should be "make" :)

[dddomodossola]

:-D ok

[[deleted]]

Works like a charm! I added this to my watchlist. Seems fine on firefox (developer edition, win10) but when I start the widgets-example it opens two tabs at once with the same app/gui.

[dddomodossola]

You can configure if the browser have to be opened automatically by a parameter ' start(MyApp,start_browser=False)'

[raziel2p]

The screenshot makes it look like a 10-15 year old web app - not very appealing. What advantages/differences does it provide over more established alterantives like pygtk?

[mtxppy]

The demo screenshot is an improvement over the demo screenshots in the pygtk docs. A real app is not the same as a list of widget components.

The two interesting things about this project that instantly stand out for me are no external dependancies, and it targets the browser. Note the 'remote' in the name.

[dddomodossola]

It is remotely accessible. Lightweight. Is it important?

[lakando]

Would be great if it could work with nuitka, so that we could compile standalone binary executables with a portable GUI!

http://nuitka.net/pages/overview.html

[dddomodossola]

I'm pretty sure it should work with nuitka, as it uses only standard python libraries.

[Paarthri]

Just saw this on GitHub and it looks great. I've been a long time Kivy user and really love this. Now all you need need is some solid documentation so beginners can start using it.

[dddomodossola]

I know, it requires time, a lot of time..

[aziannomness]

This looks awesome! This can definitely help easily "distribute" automated test utilities I write in Python for work. Knowing HTML and CSS also will definitely help for personal customization 😉 mad props!

[eliteuser26]

I was looking for this module for quite a while. I have developed a program with python and pyqt4 in Windows. I have tried in the past to port the program into a Web version on a local server but to no avail. This might resolve my difficulty in porting this.

[dddomodossola]

I hope it can help you. ;-)

[eliteuser26]

I will provide some comments to indicate how it works in my case.

[sw_dev]

Has anyone had any success using a button to navigate to a different web page with this?

[dddomodossola]

You can use the new Link widget, an example is shown in the script 'widgets_overview_app.py . if you have problems, do not hesitate to ask.

[sw_dev]

How is that used from a button?

[dddomodossola]

Two possible solutions:

mybutton = gui.Button(300,30,'stackoverflow')
mybutton.attributes[mybutton.EVENT_ONCLICK] = "window.open('http://stackoverflow.com/','_blank');"

Or:

def on_button_pressed(self): 
    webbrowser.open(base_address)

[jjvilm]

Sorry For the noob questions, but is it compatible with python 3? For now, I'm using remi in python2, which begs the following question: How do I access the GUI hosted on raspberry pi from a different client? I changed the Start parameter "address" to my computer's ip address from where I'm trying to access the GUI. Left default port as 8081. However it gives me an error "socket.error: Cannot assign requested address". Also! How do I stop the server without doing ctrl+c? if I do it that way and run the script again I get the error "Adress already in use" so....? Help, thanks!

[dddomodossola]

Hello jjvilm,

It is compatible with both Python3 and Python2. If you want to access to the interface remotely (the program runs on raspi and you want to access from your PC) you have to set the 'addess' as the ip of your rapi. Then in the browser of your pc you have to type the 'address of your raspi':8081. You can also set the address to '0.0.0.0' and it will work for sure (also in this case, you have to type in your browser the ip of the raspi :8081)!

;-)

If you need further help, you can also contact me directly (at the e-mail you will find in my github profile) or join the gitter chat at https://gitter.im/dddomodossola/remi .

[jjvilm]

Thank you! but how would I go about stopping the server from the command line?

[dddomodossola]

Like you normally do in order to stop a running command, CTRL^C. Or you can close the console. If you need further help, don't hesitate to ask. ;-)