Python GUI, which one?

[Jon Perez]

Sells, Fred wrote:

> I see there are several different choices for Python GUI API's.  
> 
> Is there any indication of which ones are 
> 1. the most commonly used?
> 2. the most reliable?
> 3. the most robust?

PyGtk, PyQt, Tkinter, and wxPython are the most
'mature' and widely used.

Greg Ewing's PyGUI (http://nz.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python_gui/)
may be a promising candidate.

But I'm not particularly excited by any of the
above.  Instead, I think the 'holy grail' would be
if the Mozilla people became more receptive to the
idea of letting us script XUL via Python (instead of
Javascript).

XUL is both a cross-platform widget toolkit _AND_ GUI
specification language and it is so easy and fast to
use I would rather use it to build a GUI rather
than a visual designer!

Too bad the Mozilla people see XUL's future as more or
less evolving in the direction of Javascript, RDF and
some obscure de jure W3C standards which I highly doubt
will ever see the light of day.

If only some genius could hack the existing XUL widget
toolkit and its XPCOM interfaces to make it scriptable
with Python instead of Javascript.  Or, failing that,
recreate an XUL implementation that works with Python
(will not need XPCOM or RDF anymore).

The ideal future would be a Mozilla browser that is
scriptable directly with Python and which also includes
a Python interpreter.  That way, you can deploy full-fledged
XUL-based GUI apps (written in Python instead of yucky
Javascript) on the net which will run for anyone who uses
Mozilla.

Javascript + W3C DOM is mediocre at best, and unfixable, so
we should be jumping to XUL for web app UIs instead.  And
XUL works just as well for desktop apps as well (as evidenced
by the Mozilla suite of applications incl. FireFox and
Thunderbird).

With speculations that Google might want to make their own
(Mozilla-based?) browser,

http://news.com.com/Clues+may+point+to+Google+browser/2100-1032_3-5379625.html

and knowing that Python is extensively used within the
company, perhaps the time has come for Python to start
supplanting Javascript as the client-side scripting language
of the web, and for XUL to replace W3C DOM/DHTML as the
interface specification language/API for web applications.