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