Python for Decision Makers and Business Leaders Transcripts
Chapter: No Python here
Lecture: Probably not for shipping apps
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0:00
Another thing where Python is challenged. This one is not impossible, it's certainly doable but it's not as easy as some of the other languages.
0:09
Is shipping packaged up applications to consumers. Now it's easy to ship Python web apps to servers
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and make them run, or data science docker containers to data scientists to run their analysis. Like, that type of shipping stuff is, easy.
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Same as, it's easy to ship the libraries like NumPy Or Jupyter to developers so, they can use to write their code and do the things they got to do.
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What I'm talking about is I would like to give a consumer a final end user an icon they can put in their mac doc click it, and make it run.
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Or they put it in their start menu in Windows and they click the icon, and it runs. They don't necessarily know anything about Python.
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They don't know anything about setting up Python. They don't want to know the thing was created in Python.
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They just want, here's a thing I receive from this company or this project. I double click it, a UI comes up, and magic happens.
1:06
There's two reasons that this is challenging. One, we talked about Python being an intermediate level of goodness for building UI desktop applications.
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There's things like [Cute], Qt for Python. There's thing like WX Python, so yeah you can definitely build some decent UI's in Python.
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But, it's not as easy as say windows forms or like old school visual basic where you had a designer and you drag and drop stuff over.
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Remember that thing I just showed you about IOS and our app? We have that cool visual designer and the properties and all that?
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There's not much of that. I believe the Qt folks have a Qt creator which is kind of like that. I don't know how well it supports Python though.
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Anyway, you can build these desktop apps. It's not as good as some of these other frameworks but it's not bad. But, it's also difficult to turn Python
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the Python source code, the Python run time and the libraries to depend upon into a thing you can give
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to a user with no dependencies and no other requirements. Like, they don't have to set up Python and configure it.
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Just, I want the icon, I just want to double click it and I want to work like Microsoft Word, Firefox Chrome, whatever.
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Let's talk really quickly about some options for making that happen. If you do want to do it you can use something called PyInstaller.
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So, PyInstaller is a thing you can point at a virtual environment with your Python source code
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your dependencies installed, and it will create stand alone executables with these icons like I'm talking about
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for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Free BSD, Soleris, and AIX. I don't even know what AIX is actually. But it will create them for them.
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So, you can distribute your applications there. And this works pretty well actually. I've done it a few times.
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There's certain weirdness-es and things like why does the terminal show up on this operating systems but just the UI and no terminal on windows.
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There's just, it's not smooth and absolutely perfect. There's just a few rough edge cases. So, I guess the advice I would give you here
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is this might actually totally solve the distribution give me an icon I can double click it problem
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but just test it. Make sure it's going to work for you. This one's been around here for a long time. You can see it's doing this fun razor thing.
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Don't know what the status of it is but it's been recently updated. A newer one this one uses the Rust packaging tools to try to do some more
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but maybe even improve upon PyInstaller called PyOxidizer. It's the same basic idea though. It's going to take your Python code
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it's going to bundle Python the run time into it it's going to bundle the libraries that you said you depend upon and try to run your code.
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So, maybe this is what you need maybe PyInstaller is what you need. If you can get those two to work for your project
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then you're really far down the path of like we can probably use Python to distribute our application. For example, Dropbox does this.
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If you have that little box icon in your start menu or you have it in your task bar or menu bar that is a local .exe or .app file
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that is 100% Python or mostly Python. So, it can be done. It can totally be done. It's just not necessarily the easiest
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pressing to compile button in visual studio and there's the .exe, I copied over and it runs. The streaming of these applications is challenging
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but it can absolutely be done. So, It depends how committed you are to Python this is something that does take some work but it can be done.