Tkinter: The good, the bad, and the ugly!

[Arndt Roger Schneider]

rantingrick schrieb:
> On Jan 18, 7:09 am, Arndt Roger Schneider <arndt.ro... at addcom.de>
> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Summary wxWidgets:
>>wxWidgets is large scale C++ library from the 20th century,
>>solemnly dedicated toward desktop computers.
>>wxWidgets originates from a time before templates
>>were used in C++ and thus duplicates many of
>>today's C++ features.
>>wxWidgets is not suitable for a modern type
>>GUI ad thus clearly not the toolkit/framework
>>of the 21st century.
> 
> 
> 
> Alight i'll except that Rodger. Wx may be unusable for the mobile
> market. And since the mobile market is exploding --and will continue
> to explode-- then we need to consider this. However, does any GUI
> library exist that can handle desktop, mobile, and accessibility and
> do it all in a 21st century way? You slaughtered wx but failed to
> provide any alternative, however i am listing to your advice contently
> because it is very good advice. Read on...

Thanks! Again this is not about the quality of wxWidgets,
wxWidgets grew large because there was vested interest in it.
Its success is its undoing.

> 
> We DO need to consider the mobile market in this decision. Maybe it is
> time for us to actually get on the cutting edge of GUI's. Maybe we
> should head an effort to create a REAL 21st century GUI that can
> handle desktop, mobile, and accessibility, and do it all whilst
> looking very sharp! Sure we rob from peter to pay paul. We will use
> Tkinters awesome API and geometry managers, wxPythons feature
> richness, and any other code we can steal to make this work!

I am not sure whether this sarcasms or for real...,
so I'll take for genuine.

Tk is also doomed, and Tkinter isn't Tk.
You are right about keeping the separate geometry
managers, though.

For starters:
http://kenai.com/projects/swank

Swank publishes java/swing classes as tk
in jtcl, which is similar to what tkinter does for
python and tk.

It should be feasible to use swank with the
tkinter interface for jpython--without jtcl.
However, this doesn't make tkinter mobile,
neither is swing available on android.
When you look into the android developer
documents concerning the gui, then you can see
that the gui model is quite similar to tk.
So I suppose android can be reached by jpython
in a two stage process.

The other devices are more difficult to reach, though.
There is webkit on some, but not all. Webkit
is available for the desktop, ios and android--today without svg.

There are two ways to gain graphical independence:
First a basic implementation for each platform and
second through abstraction.

With abstraction I mean to base the gui on a common graphical
model present on all platforms and hence to implement the
"toolkit" on-top of it in python (not C, C++, java,javascript), python!
The single common graphical model is SVG.

> 
> Then we can "advertise" python as the best GUI language available. I
> have nothing against seeing Python on more devices and this would no
> doubt bring that dream into fruition. There is a huge hole in the
> market at this very moment and we need to pounce on it like a hungry
> tiger on wildebeest. Just think how wonderful it would be to switch
> from mobile to desktop and still write beatiful Python code.
> 

So be it.
-roger