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WxPython versus Tkinter.

Nicholas Devenish misnomer at gmail.com
Tue Jan 25 18:01:48 EST 2011 
On 25/01/2011 19:16, CM wrote:
> On Jan 25, 10:13 am, Nicholas Devenish<misno... at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
> I don't know--you sound too reasonable to extrapolate from this goofy
> thread to a huge toolkit project that has been around for years and is
> used in project such as Audacity (that's the wxWidgets version, but
> close enough).  But yes, it almost at times seemed like--from what I
> could manage to read--this thread was a "psy-ops" (psychological
> operations) trick to turn off wxPython adopters by associating it with
> juvenile nonsense, and yes, on a quick scan it could turn people
> off.

Personally, no, it probably wouldn't have caused me not to use wx. But 
it certainly would have put a mental tick in the against box, because a 
frameworks community matters. As a little aside, a personal example is 
Django, whose tutorial contained what to my un-django-trained eye looked 
like an inconsistency bug, without explanation. I filed a bug report, 
and apparently many other people have had the same misassumption 
(indicating a problem with the tutorial). The bug was closed with words 
effectively equivalent to "Stupid newbie". Ignoring the fact that 
documentation being consistently misinterpreted should indicate a real 
problem, why should I put my time and effort into learning a framework 
with a community that is so hostile, when there are plenty of alternatives?

> Which would be a shame, because, as you, Andrea, and others have
> noted, wxPython is a nice toolkit.  For those interested, download it
> and make sure to download the Demo, that shows what can be done with
> it.  (Very early in this discussion the screenshots on the website
> came up; they are horrifically out of date and wxPython deserves
> better and looks great on, say, Windows 7 or Ubuntu....well, it looks
> native, and that's the point).

I actually chose wxPython partly on the strength of it's native-ness - 
it looks like other mac applications, and doesn't run through X11, but I 
was also extremely impressed by the comprehensive wxPython demo. That, 
and installation seemed to be pretty easy, whereas GTK looked a little 
like a minefield (QT I have a personal bias against, because for 
whatever reason I associate it with KDE and in general dislike kde's 
'look' and design philosopy).

> But what I would enjoy is a discussion about GUIs in terms of "develop
> once, deploy many".  For example, pyjamas, since I think being able to
> develop one GUI that works as desktop or web-based is kind of
> exciting.  Unfortunately, it seems it is far off from anything easily
> usable at this point.  Part of that might be it doesn't have a big
> enough community of developers yet.  It's also just really difficult,
> I'm sure.

I was only aware of pyjamas as a "Python to Javascript" compiler, and 
didn't know you could write desktop applications in it too. One to watch!
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