python gui builders

[Kevin Walzer]

On 11/18/09 4:15 PM, Simon Hibbs wrote:
> On 17 Nov, 23:25, Kevin Walzer<k... at codebykevin.com>  wrote:
>> On 11/17/09 4:25 PM, Tim Daneliuk wrote:
>>
>>> +1 Tkinter for the simple stuff
>>
>> You can actually use Tkinter to do quite sophisticated GUI's that rival
>> anything found in Qt or wx...
>
> Neither Tkinteror Wx have anything that come close to QGraphicsView,
> the Model-View-Delegate framework, the Phonon multimedia framework
> integration, QtSQL, QtXML, QtSVG, and the many other first grade
> components in Qt. You can substitute components from other frameworks,
> e.g. for database access, but then you lose the integration QtSQL has
> with the model-view-delegate features in other parts of the Qt world.

A few points of response:

-I was focusing primarily on the UI bits, not the other parts of Qt. 
People tend to think that Tkinter only has labels, listboxes, buttons 
and menus: recent advances in Tk have greatly expanded and modernized 
the available widgets. There's also a rich econsystem of widget packages 
within Tk that can be wrapped in Tkinter.

-Qt's support for things like SQL and XML make sense in a Pythonic 
context mainly if you're focusing on their integration with other parts 
of Qt. Python has many of these things just fine on its own, as you 
doubtless know.

>
> Qt is much more than just a GUI framework, it's more of a rival to
> something like the MacOS development libraries, or the .NET framework
> in terms of the library facilities it offers. I think that's why Nokia
> bought into it. Qt provides them with a platform with the potential to
> rival the iPhone dev environment.

Of course, and I certainly wasn't claiming otherwise.

>
> Of course to take full advantage of it you need to invest in learning
> it all, which is non-trivial. It comes at a cost in time and potential
> lock-in. But the point is you can't just say Qt is just like Wx.
>

wxWidgets (the C++ library) has support for a lot of things other than 
UI bits, as well. wxPython itself is mainly a GUI library because the 
additional features of wxWidgets in C++ are redundant in Python.

--Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com