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using python as a GUI interface for C++ code.

Started by amitm02 Oct 10, 2008 at 10:49 AM 3 replies 1k views
Original Post
amitm02
amitm02
Hi all. Newbie question. I have piece of a long C++ algorithm. i would like to create a GUI for it using Python. I've played around a bit with boost::python, and it seems to work nicely. My problem is this: I can call the wrapped C++ functions with ease from the python script, however, sometimes i need the C++ code to interact with the GUI. For example i would like the C++ code to be able to update an image in the GUI or to print some text. I do not know how to do so. I guess i could break stuff to smaller functions and let python call each of them and use their returned values to update the interface, however, i would like to make it more of an event driven design. In addition, in my particular case, the GUI is for a debug purposes. Making the C++ code to interact with the GUI, will save me lots of development time. is there an elegant method to accomplish that? thanks all.
SiCrane
SiCrane
You can pass Python objects to C++ as boost::python::object's. From there you can use attr() to get access to individual members of the object such as methods. If you want a specific example, try posting something that you're trying to do.
amitm02
amitm02
Quote:
Original post by SiCrane
You can pass Python objects to C++ as boost::python::object's. From there you can use attr() to get access to individual members of the object such as methods. If you want a specific example, try posting something that you're trying to do.


thanks SiCrane.
is that the common design approach for such task?
if not, what is the proper design approach i should go for?
(by "task", i mean using another higher level interpreted language for a UI)

are there any documentation or code examples for what I'm trying to do i can look at?

please feel free to tell me I'm going totally in the wrong direction. I'm mainly guessing here about how i should approach the problem. :)

I dont have the exact C++ code yet, but what i had in mind, is some image processing algorithm, with various steps. I would like that each step will display the current temporary image in the UI for debug purposes. So, i can see in the UI, all the temp images of the different stages together on screen.
mrbastard
mrbastard
Quote:
Original post by amitm02
are there any documentation or code examples for what I'm trying to do i can look at?


You could take a look at a little app I wrote to generate normal maps from heightmaps. The GUI is done in wxPython, the image processing in c++, hooked together with boost.python as you describe. I'm not sure it's the 'best' way to do things, but it works.

app
code

I ended up keeping all the image data in c++ and displaying images with opengl - it seemed easier than passing the image data to python. A strategy I considered for doing this was just to pass it as a string (e.g. raw bytes in a string object) - PIL can work with images in this format.

Again, not sure what I'm showing you is 'best', but I'm sure SiCrane will steer you in the right direction anyway [smile]

[size="1"]
SiCrane
SiCrane
There really is no "best" in the case of talking about binding arbitrary high level and low level languages. Passing a python object to C++ is probably what I would do in the specific case of C++/Python, but if I was using a C# GUI with C on Windows, I might just pass a HWND from C# and use SendMessage() in C.

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