Tkinter and Swing performance

[Mike Clarkson]

On Sun, 27 May 2001 17:11:50 GMT, "C.L" <no at spam.org> wrote:

>Has anyone done a large GUI app with Python and TKinter?  So far I have
>found that:
>1. TKinter is faster (more responsive) than Java's Swing library
>2. Tkinter apps use less memory than a similar sized Swing app
>3. I find Tkinter is easier to work with than Swing
>
>Does Tkinter's performance slow down when an app gets large enough? 

Yes and no (of course). The underlying Tk to Tkinter if very
efficient; I've see 100,000 line Tk programs running in 8M virtual
under Linux, which is pretty amazing for an interpreted language.

> So far,
>I am thinking building my client's GUI's in TKinter and Python is the way to
>go, and to use Java on the backend where needed.  I know that Java has never
>been a real good candidate for the client side apps, but now even with
>trying my apps on the new JDK 1.4 Beta which is supposed to handle Swing
>more efficiently, there doesn't seem to be any noticeable difference, and
>the JDK is now 48 meg in size!

>Any advice on medium to large Tkinter apps?  Problems, issues?

You have an alternative with Tkinter if you find your application is
getting too memory consuming. As a rule, a lot of UI code is modular
and self contained, so if you don't mind mixing languages, you can
code self-contained UI portions directly inTk, and call them from
Tkinter. You'll be able the Python overhead on the Tk code that
is never used by Tkinter.

Mike.