Google App Engine UI Widgets

Question

Are there any UI widgets available to the python side of Google App Engine? I'd like something like the collapsed/expanded views of Google Groups threads. Are these type things limited to the GWT side?

Answer 1

Why not simply use jQueryUI? It's a tested and very solid library, and will be easier to pick up than anything else at the current stage.

Cheers

Answer 2

ToscaWidgets, in the version 2 that's currently in alpha test, is said to support App Engine (at least for the tw2.core part). I've also seen posts showing ways (a bit complicated ones, it seemed to me) to use the current ToscaWidgets on App Engine.

App Engine itself definitely does not include any such "widgets" package -- it has WSGI (a much lower-level service, which allows plugging in most Python web app frameworks at your choice), an extremely simple request/response/router "webapp" for trivially simple apps, and django (in several versions -- only 0.96 is part of the SDK download, but up to 1.1 for the actual service I believe) which uses templating, not widgets.

But the point of the GAE arrangement is that if you don't like django (which according to one estimate is used for > 80% Python web apps on the open web) you're welcome to plug in your own favorite framework, as long as it respects GAE's constraints (Python 2.5, no native code, no relational DB available, &c). For example, I like the werkzeug "non-framework" which works at the WSGI level (if I need UI I do tend to do it in Javascript, too, though usually with dojo/dijit or Google Closure rather than with jquery/jqueryUI -- App Engine could care less either way of course;-).

Despite django's near-dominance in mindshare (comparable to that of Rails in the Ruby world, I guess), Python is still fairly known as the language with more web frameworks than keywords. When Python 3 was brewing I suggested to Guido the obvious solution to that issue -- add many, many more keywords... but he didn't seem to take this suggestion all that seriously!-)

Answer 3

There is no difference in the amount of built in widgets available to the python and java sides of app engine. Neither side has any! App Engine is primarily a back end technology. It allows you to use pretty much whatever web framework you want for your presentation layer, subject to constraints that Alex mentions.

GWT is completely unrelated to App Engine, besides being developed by Google. It is a client side toolkit, and can be used just fine with any web app as a backend, whether created in java, python or [your favorite language]. (Admittedly, you get a few bonus features if your backend is in java.)