GUI speed

[Tim Churches]

On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 15:32, Gerhard Häring wrote, not entirely
helpfully,:
> Rick Richardson wrote:
> > 
> > I'm currently reviewing technologies for a large, gui intensive application.
> > We're planning on having a template driven dynamic gui system, but having
> > written Java gui's in the past I'm concerned that python may share java's
> > affliction and be slower than molassses in January.
> >  
> > Can anyone out there comment on the relative speed of Java's gui libs and
> > any one of the python gui libs?
> 
> Sure I can. Try it out.

If you are "planning on having a template driven dynamic gui system"
then you might want to look seriously at PythonCard (see
http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/ ), which is an XML template driven
dynamic GUI system. PythonCard is built on top of wxPython, which is a
binding for wxWindows, which is a cross-platform wrapper around native
GUI calls. The end result is very fast. On Windows systems, wxPython is
a piece of cake to install (it may require some library updates and
hence a bit more effort on some Linux and unix system, but not too
hard). PythonCard is simplicity itself to install once you have
wxPython.

Others will comment on pyQT and Tkinter, neither of which I have used
much. If it is a big project, it is worth spending time investigating
and testing all these, and comparing them against Java GUIs, before
making a decision. Don't forget to investigate licensing issues, which
is a factor with PyQT on some platforms, I believe.

So ultimately Gerhard's advice is sound.

Tim C