Which GUI?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

J.C.Travers <J.C.Travers at durham.ac.uk> wrote:
<...>

> The best GUI in my opinion is pyQT. It is a fully supported
> widget/application set written in C++, so it is natural for python
> (object-orientated). The python wrappers for it are brilliant and the
> documentation is massive (unlike Tk). It is available on your platform
> (as well as Unix and Mac) and has every conceivable widget you could
> want. (Particular tables and multicolumn list boxes). It is simple and
> logical to code in.

When I had to choose a gui a year ago, I also evaluated the lot -
PyQt/KDE, tkInter, CGI forms, pyGtk, pyGnome, the Python bindings to
wxWindows, even those old mfc-like Windows bindings. One aspect that was
quite important to me was desktop integration. I like session management,
configuration management, standard look & feel and things like that.

That meant that tkInter, PyGtk and wxWindows were out of the race.
Besides, a year ago pyGtk was a pig to install and wxWindows was worse.
PyGnome was uninstallable too, at the time I evaluated my options, so I
picked PyQt/KDE (actually, I first tried the old, unsupported Qt bindings
that are still somewhere around on the KDE webserver). It's good that
I like the feel of the Qt widgets. Besides, the class structure is very
good, a joy to work with, and the development rapid.

However, there's no Qt for the Mac, Qt for Windows costs a serious amount
of money, and the author of PyQt isn't able to check whether it works
on Windows - he merely states that it 'compiles'... But with support
for Qt 2.0 and KDE 2 coming things are getting exciting.  Kparts and
DCOP interfaces would be exceedingly interesting and fun to use!

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org