Tinker vs wxPython ?- Opinions/Views

[Roman Milner]

Well, I've been looking at these recently and here is my opinion:

Tkinter Pros: 

Very easy to learn
Excellent documentation (a whole book, plus some excellent web sites)
Very stable
Portable

Tkinter Cons:

Small lame selection of widgets (no notebook, no tree, no paned
windows. You can get some of these with PMW but it is slow and hasn't
been updated in a long time)
Slow.
It doesn't seem like Tk has been improved in the last several years -
it seems like new widgets will never get added.

wxPython Pros:

Fast
Great widget selection
Portable

wxPython Cons:
Lame documentation (You basically get the wxWindows C++ API reference
and a bunch of python examples.)
Difficult to learn (IMO the wxPython API is much harder on the brain
than Tkinter)
Less stable than Tkinter (it has been my experience that I have more
crashes with wxPython than TKinter)


So, IMO all of this leaves the state of python GUI development pretty
low. I've more or less decided to stick with TKinter because of how
easy it is and the docs. But if your developing a large app with a
complicated UI TKinter's simplicity starts to fall on its face because
you have to start developing your own widgets. If you are devloping a
commercial app you might want to check out the QT bindings. (It costs
money on Windows.)

Maybe anygui (http://anygui.sourceforge.net/) will solve all of this
soon.

^Roman

>>>>> "DH" == Dan Howard <dhhnews0 at hotmail.com> writes:

    DH> I'm a newbie at Python and about to create my first set of GUI
    DH> appliactions.  I would like to run them on Windows and Linux (
    DH> and possibly MAC).  I'm trying now to decide whether to use
    DH> Tinker or wxPthyon.  Would appleciate views, opinions and
    DH> experiences...  Thanks - Dan