Tkinter or wxpython?

[kyosohma at gmail.com]

On Aug 6, 9:39 am, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> kyoso... at gmail.com writes:
> >  I've read that Tkinter doesn't scale well if you're writing complex
> > GUIs. I haven't been able to test this hypothesis though. However,
> > since I had to rewrite VBA apps into Python, to get the right "look
> > and feel" I needed the widgets that wxPython provided. Since I started
> > out with C++, I find wxPython better than Tkinter, but it's all pretty
> > subjective. Try them both!
>
> Tkinteger (dang, I always end up typing it that way, I won't even
> bother fixing the error) is easy to use for simple gui's, and it's
> part of the standard python distro which for me is a big advantage (no
> extra crap to download).  However, the widget set is rather ugly and
> doesn't blend in well with anyone's native widgets; the widget
> selection itself is rather narrow, and I think kyosohma may be right
> that it doesn't scale well to complex gui's.  I've looked at the code
> for IDLE's gui and it's terrifying.
>
> At this point I think nobody should write desktop gui apps without a
> good reason.  There is a fairly flexible and easy to program gui
> already running on almost every desktop, namely the web browser.
> Before you write a gui using some client side toolkit, ask yourself
> whether you can instead embed a web server in your application and
> write an HTML gui.  That approach is not always the answer, but it has
> considerable advantages when you can do it that way.

I agree that making web apps is probably the way of the future.
However, there are lots of security risks involved with it that need
to be understood. One of the problems that raging is about AJAX, see
here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070802-security-experts-warn-developers-about-the-risks-of-premature-ajax-ulation.html

Desktop apps have security issues too, of course.

Mike