Report on the meeting of 7th May 2013

[Tibs]

Present were Tom, Bryan, Sami and myself.

Whilst no-one had technically prepared a talk, Bryan had been researching enaml, the new Enthought "DSL for declarative user interfaces", and he went through the Enthought slideset on the new technology ("Enaml: GUIs made easy"), and also talked through (and debugged live!) some actual use of it. Or, as he put it, ad-libbing after playing with it for an hour or so earlier in the day.

Apparently enaml may stand for "enaml ain't a markup language'. But perhaps it's best not to dwell on that.

It is a strict superset of Python (and can include Python code). It is essentially Enthought's TraitsUI mark 2 ("done right"). When you import an emaml file, special magic (presumably an import hook) is used to handle the variant AST.

In summary, I've used TraitsUI and it's quite pleasant, but can get a bit messy for complex examples. Enaml rather enforces the separation of model and view (arguably a good thing) because the Enaml file needs to be imported to make it work (although there is a "run enaml file" user command), but it seems to be both simpler to use than TraitsUI and more powerful (notably, it can manage views that are difficult to describe in the former).

In the context of Traits, I think it's a clear win.

And  that nicely took up all the time of the meeting.

Tibs