ready to use python, need help with GUI decision

[Christian Tismer]

Peter Hansen wrote:

> Ed Cogburn wrote:
> 
>> David McNab wrote:
>>
>>> My personal favourite is Tkinter, with the 'steroids' that go by the 
>>> name of PMW.
>>
>>
>> Have you also tried wxPython?  I'm not advocating, just want to know 
>> if you've also tried "the other one".  :)  What does PMW do for 
>> Tkinter?  I've seen opinions suggesting wxPython was "better" than 
>> (standard) Tkinter, but I've never seen PMW mentioned before when 
>> comparing the two.  If you've used wxPython previously, how does 
>> Tkinter+PMW compare to it?  Anyone?
> 
> 
> I've used both, and didn't find PMW any more compelling than I found 
> Tkinter alone.  I still find that wxPython fits my brain better and 
> gives me better results.  This, however, is an area where individual 
> mileage definitely varies, based on past reports here that strongly 
> support either the one or the other approach depending on who's writing.

If I may add to this:
I have been using wxPython for 1.5 years, now. And I'm not
completely happy, I'm just pleased. I heared that QT is
smaller and more capable, should also be more elegant.
Can't really judge it. The problem with QT is that it is not
free for commercial products under Windows.

wxPython has some subtle hurdles which can cost you days of
research, annoying when you are used to the ease of Delphi
for GUI development. For instance, I wanted to grab keyboard
events on a wxStaticBitmap object and almost didn't get any.
After a longer search, I found a note that this only works
if you switch of tab processing for the enclosing wxFrame
objects. For me as (in this case :) the application
programmer, this is just bad, and almost unsolveable without
the help of the mailing list. I also doubt that this behavior
necessarily has to be implemented in this rigorous way.

There is also a serious strugle with flicker. Meanwhile, I
solved all these issues for me, but again, this took days and
weeks of research. With Delphi, I never had this problem.
Now I *have* smooth, flicker free display of little movies
with wxPython, but I had to do all the drawing by myself,
had to remove all implicit calls to erase the background,
and it is a huge code cruft. Anyway, it works very fine.

So I can't recommend wxPython wholeheartedly, it has cost me
much more efforts than I wanted to invest.
On the other hand, it is free, and it does it's job, in the
end. As a positive add-on, there is Boa Constructor, which
I happily use to create my wxPython stuff. It is still young,
very ambitious but not really ready, but I like it very much.

I will look into PyGame, which does not have a GUI at all,
but seems to be quite simple and platform-independant, and
I'm thinking to write my own GUI layer on top of it.
This would of course be Stackless Python centered from the
ground. I'm not sure if it will happen in this life,
but I'm thinking positive.

Until then, I will continue to cope with wxPython. I don't
say it is perfect, but I do say it can be what you want.

cheers -- chris

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