wxwindows question

[Jorge Godoy]

On Saturday 17 January 2004 20:31 Nuff Said wrote in
<pan.2004.01.17.22.31.58.284937 at phreaker.net>:
 
> I use(d) wxPython 2.4.2.4 with Python 2.3.x on various Linux
> systems (incl. SuSE and Fedora Core).

The same here... But with Conectiva Linux. SuSE is Conectiva's partner
on the United Linux Consortium.
 
> When I compiled wxPython with Unicode support, the demo either
> did not work at all resp. every second or so widget crashed.

I haven't tried using Unicode. My applications still don't need it and
I've seen lots of reports about it not working properly. 

> Without Unicode support, e.g. the StyledTextControl (Scintilla)
> crashed whenever I tried to enter a 'special' character (i.e.
> a character which is not a 7 bit ASCII character). The use of
> other widgets resulted in seg faults, too; but I do not remember
> exactly, which ones.

It doesn't happen here. Since I'm Brazilian I use a lot of chars that
are not 7 bit ASCII (á, é, ç, ã, õ, etc.) in a lot of places :-) No
crashes due to that, except with an old version of wxGlade on
Windows, where my parter couldn't open / create a file with "special"
chars on titles and notebook tabs: it crashed there. On the other
hand, it worked perfectly on Linux and on the running application, so
after he finished the application, he used my Linux box to add all
the missing stuff (then he learnt about sed & cia. with me). 

> I tried to compile wxPython (resp. wxGTK) for GTK1 and GTK2; the
> former seemed to be more stable (but looked awful).

I agree with you on that one. I haven't insisted much on the GTK2
stuff though. 
 
> After a week or two of testing, I gave up on wxPython (for the
> moment). I wrote a lot of cross platform applications in Python
> (together with C and, recently, C#) using Tkinter (resp. Tcl/Tk)
> and pyGTK (resp. GTK+ for other languages) and never had such
> problems. But both GUI toolkits lack some important widgets and
> therefore I became interested in wxPython (though I don't like the
> way I have to code in wxPython; but that's my personal problem :-)

Could you please say more on the way the other tools are used? I
adapted better with wxPython than Tkinter here... Probably I would
look after Tkinter different today and I would even try it a little
more based on several comments here, but then theres wxPython and it
is solving my problems very nicely.

Which widgets you missed there? 

> Recently, I write a lot of web applications (whenever possible),
> using good old CGIs, various frameworks and ASP.NET (with C#).
> But my dream for Python would be a native GUI toolkit (and not
> just a wrapper for something else which was not designed with
> Python in mind).

It would be very good if wxPython was more python centric instead of
trying to be more like wxWindows. But I guess that people who
prototype in wxPython and then convert some parts (or all) of their
application to C++ wouldn't like such a change... 

There's "equilibrium" here, and messing with that would be
dangerous :-) Another advantage is that wxWindows is already there
and it works. It would be a shame not to benefit from that. 


Since you mentioned CGIs, don't you like using Python for that? 


Be seeing you,
-- 
Godoy.     <godoy at ieee.org>