What GUI toolkit looks the best?

[Max Slimmer]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

I have been using wxPython and it performs well ... You should also look
at Boa Constructor a GUI designer generates decent Python code,
integrated debugger is cool, shows local varraibles... for some uses I
find it better than winpython.


Paul Rubin wrote:[color=blue]
> Brian Kelley <bkelley@wi.mit .edu> writes:
>[color=green]
>>Why forget Tkinter? I've seen Tkinter applications that look
>>incredibly fabulous.[/color]
>
>
> Got any url's for screen shots?
>
>[color=green]
>>A lot depends on what you are trying to do. If
>>you are making a graphics-heavy application then Tkinter's canvas is
>>pretty sweet. I also think IDLE looks pretty good.[/color]
>
>
> There will be some graphical icons and stuff like that which people
> will click on, but no really heavy graphics or drawing tools in the
> sense of a photo editor or anything like that.
>
>[color=green]
>>Glade isn't a GUI, it is a GUI builder that uses GTK. In my
>>experience, GTK doesn't look quite right on windows boxes, especially
>>the menus. Of course I have the same basic view of Qt and Swing so
>>know you know my biases.[/color]
>
>
> Oh ok, I understand a bit better now.
>
>[color=green]
>>I tend to use Tkinter for canvas heavy applications and wxPython for
>>other stuff.[/color]
>
>
> Is wxPython Windows specific? I guess it is, but can I port the
> screen layouts to some comparable Linux toolkit or anything like that?
> The screen shots for it do look really nice.
>
>[color=green]
>>Here is my humble opinions in a nutshell (missing a lot here):
>>wxPython has a grid control to die for and many, many classes, good
>>printer support and looks like a native GTK app on Linux and a native
>>app on windows and macintosh.[/color]
>
>
> Oh wow, yes I guess it's cross platform then. Hmm, what Micro$oft
> tool do I need to build and run it? Is Visual C++ enough? I guess
> I can get the client to pay for some stuff like that. Also, is there
> a Glade-like drag and drop gui editor for it?
>
>[color=green]
>>Qt is better for developing - it has a better class structure and I
>>tend not to have to look up docs as often and can look really,
>>really nice.[/color]
>
>
> The KDE apps that I've seen look good but not really top notch. Maybe
> more attention could improve them. They're certainly good enough for
> practical use.
>
>[color=green]
>>Tkinter has a killer canvas and great postscript output. GTK is
>>really quite fast.[/color]
>
>
> I think I don't care about heavy duty graphics or more than rudimentary
> printing.
>
>[color=green]
>>but don't take my word for this, why don't you see what you like the best?
>>
>>http://www.wxpython.org/
>>http://www.gtk.org/
>>http://www.scriptics.com/
>>http://www.trolltech.com/[/color]
>
>
> I don't know what I can really tell from these without more experience
> with them. In particular, which is the most solid and reliable across
> a wide range of Windows versions (95, 98, ..., XP whatever)? That
> matters too.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Paul[/color]

[Jon Franz]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

> > What's wrong with Jython? I haven't used it myself, but have always
wondered[color=blue][color=green]
> > why it's not mentioned when different Python GUI:s are discussed.[/color]
>
> Jython + SWT is a pretty cool combination. SWT is a well-designed, high
> performance portable toolkit using native widgets. Python is our favorite
> language. If they could be married without Java it would be even better.
>
> Oren[/color]

I use jython + java swing for a large, ongoing contract. The plugable look
& feels allow you to add some nice UI skins to your application with 1 or
two lines of code - I use the 'Alloy' look and feel from incors
(http://www.incors.com/lookandfeel/index.php) - though it does cost.

One nice thing with swing (and forgive me if SWT does this, I am not
familiar with it) is that most widgets will allow html to be used within the
text for simple markup - allowing for easy display of formatted paragraphs,
bold text, etc. It also comes in handy when you want to throw an image onto
a label widget.

You can use sun's one-studio (netbeans) to design your gui, and then use the
classes it generates within your jython code fairly easily. I find myself
creating quick and dirty forms all the time by hand in jython (its just so
fast - so few lines of code), but I am convert a lot of them to actual java
classes later for increased speed.

I'm off to look into SWT...

~Jon Franz
NeuroKode Labs, LLC
513.260.5788

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Paul Rubin wrote:[color=blue]
> Brian Kelley <bkelley@wi.mit .edu> writes:
>[/color]
(snip)[color=blue]
>
>[color=green]
>>I tend to use Tkinter for canvas heavy applications and wxPython for
>>other stuff.[/color]
>
>
> Is wxPython Windows specific? I guess it is,[/color]

You lose.
[color=blue]
> but can I port the
> screen layouts to some comparable Linux toolkit or anything like that?
> The screen shots for it do look really nice.
>
>[color=green]
>>Here is my humble opinions in a nutshell (missing a lot here):
>>wxPython has a grid control to die for and many, many classes, good
>>printer support and looks like a native GTK app on Linux and a native
>>app on windows and macintosh.[/color][/color]

Perhaps because it uses 'native' (ie : Gtk+, Motif, Windows native or
MacOS X native) toolkits ?-)
[color=blue]
>
> Oh wow, yes I guess it's cross platform then.[/color]

You win !-)
[color=blue]
> Hmm, what Micro$oft
> tool do I need to build and run it? Is Visual C++ enough?[/color]
Yeps. Or bcc, or mingw, or...
[color=blue]
> I guess
> I can get the client to pay[/color]

Why ? It's free (as in free beer and free speech)
[color=blue]
> for some stuff like that. Also, is there
> a Glade-like drag and drop gui editor for it?
>[/color]
wxGlade.

And also boa, PythonCard...
[color=blue]
> I don't know what I can really tell from these without more experience
> with them. In particular, which is the most solid and reliable across
> a wide range of Windows versions (95, 98, ..., XP whatever)? That
> matters too.[/color]

Can't tell you about that (I used wxWindows on win98 and NT4ws and
Linux/Gtk+, without any trouble but as in any non-trivial code, there
are bugs... no more no less than in MFC or Borland toolkits)

Bruno

[Paul Rubin]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.nospam@ removeme.free.f r> writes:[color=blue][color=green]
> > I guess
> > I can get the client to pay[/color]
>
> Why ? It's free (as in free beer and free speech)[/color]

I mean for the build tools (Visual C++ or whatever). I can't really
use the WxWindows source code without a way to compile it. I'm getting
discouraged to hear that WxWindows itself has numerous bugs though.

[Brian Kelley]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Paul Rubin wrote:
[color=blue]
> Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.nospam@ removeme.free.f r> writes:
>[color=green][color=darkred]
>>>I guess
>>>I can get the client to pay[/color]
>>
>>Why ? It's free (as in free beer and free speech)[/color]
>
>
> I mean for the build tools (Visual C++ or whatever). I can't really
> use the WxWindows source code without a way to compile it. I'm getting
> discouraged to hear that WxWindows itself has numerous bugs though.[/color]

I think that these might be a bit overblown. I have released some
medium-scale academic research packages to beta-testers using wxPython
and have had no problems so far. There are about 150 installations so
far at ten different sites. I have had more problems with different
installation styles of microsoft excel than I have had with supporting
wxPython bugs. Your mileage may vary however, and I certainly don't use
all the widgets (read textctrl).

The largest hurdles are with differences between windows/linux and mac,
but I have experienced similar differences with Tkinter. Not for the
GUI itself but with dealing with the clipboard etc. You may get
different behavior on different platforms so debugging on those
platforms is a must. I've been luck so far and the documentation is
pretty good.

I have seen wxPython crashes during development but they all have to do
with errors in the constructors of subclassed widgets. If you raise an
exception in a constructor before calling the baseclass' __init__
function wxPython get's very unhappy and dies miserably taking
everything down. Two solutions/workarounds are

1) always call the subclassed constructor first
2) use a try...except block where call the base __init__ with default
arguments and raise an event that will close down the app nicely.

I haven't been able to figure out a way to do this automatically on
constructor errors yet. If I could I would submit it to wxPython.

If you are running on windows or redhat linux, you won't need to build
wxPython/wxWindows, you can just download and install the binaries.

If you want to build wxPython/wxWindows by yourself you will just need
Visual C++.

Brian

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Paul Rubin wrote:[color=blue]
> Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.nospam@ removeme.free.f r> writes:
>[color=green][color=darkred]
>>>I guess
>>>I can get the client to pay[/color]
>>
>>Why ? It's free (as in free beer and free speech)[/color]
>
>
> I mean for the build tools (Visual C++ or whatever). I can't really
> use the WxWindows source code without a way to compile it.[/color]

You can build wxWindows with the free (as in free beer) Borland's bcc5.x
compiler, or with free (as in free beer and free speech) compilers like
Minwg's gcc.
[color=blue]
> I'm getting
> discouraged to hear that WxWindows itself has numerous bugs though.[/color]

I did not used wxWindows intensively, but I never had a crash in three
years. I couldn't say the same about apps written with MS VisualBasic or
like :(.

Every non-trivial code does have bugs. Python has bugs, gcc has bugs,
not talking about msvc. I think that some posts in this thread were a
bit of a special case (FUD or bad experience, I can't tell...)

wxWindows has 11 years of existence, and bindings exists for more and
more languages (Javascript, Python, Perl, haskell, lua, Ruby, Eiffel,
and even Java and C#...). I don't think so many developers would spend
personnal time writing bindings to a 'that much buggy' toolkit !-)

Bruno

[Hans Nowak]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Brian Kelley wrote:
[color=blue]
> I hate wxPython's text widget for most of the reasons you described.
> Plus, since we are using python, why isn't there a .write(...) method
> for these widgets? Why can't I use a text widget like:
>
> sys.stdout = TextCtrl(parent )[/color]

The Wax TextBox (which is based on wxTextCtrl) has had a write() method for a
while, for exactly this purpose.

(http://zephyrfalcon.org/labs/, look for Wax)
[color=blue]
> I had to make a wrapper around the text widget to make it behave like a
> StringIO() class. It internally did all the necessary conversions to
> the strings, but now I can use
>
> widget.write()
> widget.read()
> widget.readline s()
> widget.seek()
>
> for line in widget:
> pass[/color]

The TextBox control doesn't have the other methods, mostly because I've never
felt the need to do these things. :-) The iterator idea is interesting, though.

--
Hans (hans@zephyrfal con.org)

http://zephyrfalcon.org/

[Jamey Cribbs]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Paul Rubin wrote:[color=blue]
> I've been approached about writing a Windows app which will need a
> really professional looking GUI. Forget TKinter, this has to actually
> look good (real artists will be available to get the visual stuff
> right). Assuming I write in Python, what's the best toolkit to use?[/color]

Wow! What a response this question has generated. I would have to throw
my hat into the PyGTK ring, for both objective and subjective reasons.

I think GTK looks great on Windows and my PyGTK apps have been very
stable and responsive. On a more subjective note, for me, the PyGTK API
just fits my brain better than the wxPython one does. It just feels
more seemless to me and things make more sense when I look at them.
Like I said, pretty subjective.

Maybe you could write a small sample app using both PyGTK and wxPython
and see which one feels right to you.

Jamey

[Edward K. Ream]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

> > > It's not clear that wxWindows really actually works.
[color=blue][color=green]
> > Isn't that last sentence a bit overly FUD-ish?[/color][/color]
[color=blue]
> Umm. Maybe you are right.[/color]

After sleeping on this question, I think not :-) True, my choice of words
wasn't the best, but since you brought up FUD, I'm willing to discuss my
fears, uncertainties and doubts about wxWindows.

Motivation & experience

The typical FUD campaign is driven by ulterior motives. I have no such
motives--I am not the author of a product that competes with wxPython or
Tkinter: I am a somewhat frustrated user of both products. Leo is about to
come a rare beast: a gui-agnostic application. That is, Leo will soon be
able to support other gui toolkits besides tkinter. Indeed, an experimental
wxPython plugin already exists. This plugin replaces Leo's default tkinter
gui with a wxPython gui. My remarks are based on experiences with a failed
wxWindows project and the present wxPython plugin.

Psychological responses

In my case, I do have doubts that I can make wxPython projects as solid as
the equivalent Tkinter projects. Related feelings include fear and
uncertainty, and some others ;-) These feelings are real, and they are based
on substantial experience.

Objective responses

In my experience, it is a _fact_ that wxPython (really wxWindows) seems to
have many more bugs than Tkinter. It is a _rare_ bug that has no
workaround, so this fact does _not_ mean that it is impossible to produce
"working" apps with wxWindows/wxPython. What is probably _does_ mean is
that it will be more expensive to create a solid wxPython app than one would
hope. In my experience, the answer to the question "Why the hell hasn't
wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?" is: "wxWindows is buggy."

Conclusions

All my comments have been intended to alert people to the complexities and
difficulties in choosing one gui or another. I wish that Tkinter and
wxPython were better, and I think people should have their eyes open when
considering using these tools.

Edward
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Edward K. Ream email: edreamleo@chart er.net
Leo: Literate Editor with Outlines
Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------

[Peter Hansen]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Paul Rubin wrote:[color=blue]
>
> Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.nospam@ removeme.free.f r> writes:[color=green][color=darkred]
> > > I guess
> > > I can get the client to pay[/color]
> >
> > Why ? It's free (as in free beer and free speech)[/color]
>
> I'm getting
> discouraged to hear that WxWindows itself has numerous bugs though.[/color]

Paul, that's a load of FUD, as someone else said. While I'm sure
it's not bug-free, it does *not* in general crash as frequently
as Edward suggested. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of
people using it successfully (and quietly) for every time it has crashed
for him. I'd suggest he investigate his own machine's stability rather
than pointing the figure solely at wxPython. From my own experience,
it has *never* crashed in that manner, including after using the demo
extensively (i.e. trying out effectively *all* the included demos),
except with one that involved some DirectX or OpenGL stuff that wasn't
installed on my machine.

We haven't used it for really large apps, but we have a half dozen
smaller apps that are in relatively frequent use and so far no bug
reports of mysterious crashes.

Please don't let one person's experience spoil you on the idea of
at least investigating wxPython for your own use.

-Peter

[Peter Hansen]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Brian Kelley wrote:[color=blue]
>
> When I said "why isn't
> there a .write(...) method for these widgets? Why can't I use a text
> widget like<a file stream>" that wasn't a specious Robin should do this
> for me question. It really was more like, is this a way a text widget
> should behave?[/color]

That wasn't clear from the wording you used. Thanks for clarifying. :-)
It's a good question... I don't have the answer.

-Peter

[Edward K. Ream]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

> Please don't let one person's experience spoil you on the idea of[color=blue]
> at least investigating wxPython for your own use.[/color]

Actually, I think we are in "virulent agreement". I have never suggested
writing off wxWindows/wxPython, as Leo's wxPython plugin shows. I merely
suggest due caution.

My experience isn't that wxWindows doesn't work at all, it is that it takes
a lot more work to make wxWindows work as I expect than with, say, Tkinter.
It's a cost/risk issue. I should have made that clearer. wxPython reduces
that cost difference substantially, and Python provides ways of end-running
problems that didn't exist when I was using C++.

Edward
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Edward K. Ream email: edreamleo@chart er.net
Leo: Literate Editor with Outlines
Leo: http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------

[Dave Brueck]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Edward wrote:[color=blue][color=green][color=darkred]
> > > > It's not clear that wxWindows really actually works.[/color][/color]
>[color=green][color=darkred]
> > > Isn't that last sentence a bit overly FUD-ish?[/color][/color]
>[color=green]
> > Umm. Maybe you are right.[/color]
>
> After sleeping on this question, I think not :-) True, my choice of words
> wasn't the best, but since you brought up FUD, I'm willing to discuss my
> fears, uncertainties and doubts about wxWindows.
>
> Motivation & experience
>
> The typical FUD campaign is driven by ulterior motives. I have no such
> motives --I am not the author of a product that competes with wxPython or
> Tkinter[/color]

Well, I'm not really interested in pressing the issue (I don't have ulterior
motives either ;-) ), but if not FUD, it was inaccurate in the _general sense_
as many applications are built upon wxWindows/wxPython and do not have
problems. I do not doubt that you've experienced problems with that framework;
but I do take issue with the implication that such an experience is the norm -
for example, the wxWindows site has quite a list of examples that use it, and
many of which are quite widely used and certainly not toy applications (AOL
Communicator, Audacity, etc.), so I'd say it _is_ clear that it "actually
works". I have a hard time understanding how wxWindows could be so flaky and
buggy and yet still enjoy such commercial and open source success - why aren't
the people who use it drowning in support calls/emails?
[color=blue]
> In my experience, it is a _fact_ that wxPython (really wxWindows) seems to
> have many more bugs than Tkinter. It is a _rare_ bug that has no
> workaround, so this fact does _not_ mean that it is impossible to produce
> "working" apps with wxWindows/wxPython. What is probably _does_ mean is
> that it will be more expensive to create a solid wxPython app than one would
> hope. In my experience, the answer to the question "Why the hell hasn't
> wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?" is: "wxWindows is buggy."[/color]

The good news is that the wxWindows and wxPython developers are pretty good
about fixing bugs, so there's a good chance that all the bugs you found and
reported to them have been fixed by now. ;-)

It was good talking to you. Congrats on your progress with Leo - pretty neat!
-Dave

[Mark Roach]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 00:12:45 +0100, Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
[color=blue]
> You can build wxWindows with the free (as in free beer) Borland's bcc5.x
> compiler, or with free (as in free beer and free speech) compilers like
> Minwg's gcc.[/color]

but not wxPython. You must use MSVC for compiling on Windows. However,
unless you have patches or extensions to compile, the precompiled version
should work just fine.

-Mark

[Peter Hansen]

Re: What GUI toolkit looks the best?

Peter Hansen wrote:[color=blue]
>
> Brian Kelley wrote:[color=green]
> >
> > When I said "why isn't
> > there a .write(...) method for these widgets? Why can't I use a text
> > widget like<a file stream>" that wasn't a specious Robin should do this
> > for me question. It really was more like, is this a way a text widget
> > should behave?[/color]
>
> That wasn't clear from the wording you used. Thanks for clarifying. :-)
> It's a good question... I don't have the answer.[/color]

And by the way, I do appreciate your efforts on KitViewer and such... apologies
for the slight.

-Peter