Everything good about Python except GUI IDE?

[mm0fmf]

On 27/02/2016 18:13, wrong.address.1 at gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, 27 February 2016 18:08:36 UTC+2, Dietmar Schwertberger  wrote:
>> On 27.02.2016 12:18, wrong.address.1 at gmail.com wrote:
>>> Isn't there any good GUI IDE like Visual Basic? I hope there are some less well known GUI IDEs which I did not come across. Thanks.
>>
>> As of today, there's no Python GUI builder comparable to VB 6.
>>
>
> Thanks for stating this clearly. Everyone here has been trying to show me various ways to do the kind of things I will want to, but nobody clearly admits the limitations I will have to accept if I start with Python.
>
> I am starting to wonder if VB.net would be a better solution for the time being. I have learnt enough VB.net to manage my work but it is bloated and Microsoft dependent.
>
>> There are some like QtDesigner or wxGlade, but they either don't
>> generate Python code directly or they can only be used if you know the
>> underlying toolkit good enough to create the GUI yourself. You may try
>> out some, but I can almost guarantee you that you will come to the same
>> result.
>> If you want a GUI, create it yourself using either wxPython or PyQt.
>
> I will check it. I got the impression that you can create a GUI but that has to be converted to Python, and then you need a wrapper to put these forms in, and then they can be compiled or converted to *.exe with py2exe. Not a good way for development/debugging.
>
>>
>> For engineering applications that's probably the weakest point that
>> Python has.
>> It's holding back a lot of people...
>>
>> Well, for most measurement or control software a GUI is not really
>> needed, but still people want it.
>>
>
> In the 1980s everyone was happy with inputs from the command line on a line editor, but today people expect GUIs with graphics and often even animations.
>
> It is surprising that a language which seems very popular does not have GUI development infrastructure in place these many years after it got into common use.
>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Dietmar
>

I'm no C# expert but I inherited the support of some C# projects. One 
uses a form to hold the UI objects. When the program is loaded in VS, 
you see the form and you can drag and drop objects to the form and edit 
the object properties (text, font, colours etc.). The result of your 
visual work is rendered in the C# source with some code folding options. 
If you don't click the folds in the editor you don't get to see that the 
form editor generates the C# code you need to call to generate the 
objects. There are suitable comments through the generated code warning 
you not to edit it as it is regenerated etc.

The result is you use a visual tool to generate the boiler plate code. 
Knowing MS tools I'd be very suprised if the same idea is not used in 
VB. Somewhere there will be a text file with the VB boilerplate code to 
generate the form.

You need to locate that and use it to drive your VB to Python conversion 
process. I'd write myself a script that takes the autogenerated source 
and converts it to Python. You may need to polish the output but if you 
have hundreds of objects this sounds to be simpler and quicker than 
starting from scratch.

This is from my experience using C# with ASP.NET and .Net 4.0+ and 
VS2010 Professional. I think I've played with VS2013 Pro and it's the same.

YMMV.