GTK/Gnome or TKinker?

[Paul Magwene]

Steve Lamb wrote:
> 
>     I've decided to embark on a project that I want to be fairly portable
> across Unix and Windows.  It will use a GUI and I am having trouble deciding
> on which toolkit to use.  I've looked into GTK/GNome and the fact that there
> doesn't appear to be a fairly active port to Windows does exactly fill me with
> confidence in its continued support
> 
>     OTOH is TKinker.  Now, from what I hear TKinker isn't as well developed as
> GTK/Gnome so while it appears to have a stable port to Windows taking up
> TKinker might mean overall difficulties.
> 
>     Does anyone who has practical experience with these toolkits have any
> advice?
> 
> --
>          Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
>          ICQ: 5107343          | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
> -------------------------------+---------------------------------------------

The two most portable options at the moment are Tkinter and wxPython
(other potentially portable options such as GTK for windows, QT and FLTK
suffer from licensing restrictions or slow development).  Both Tkinter
and wxPython are well developed toolkits.  Robin Dunn and the wxWindows
team both seem to be going gangbusters on the development of
wxWindows/wxPython but Tk is well tested and solid.  

wxWindows does include some extra widgets that seem useful (e.g. grid
and calendar widgets) but than again it's a pretty big download to
include in a distribution or expect users to acquire on their own. 
Tkinter is pretty much standard on any machine which has Python
installed.

Tkinter also benefits from having an excellent printed reference --
Grayson's Python and Tkinter Programming.  If you're going to do any
serious GUI development on Python this is a must have.  One of the
things that this book really made me aware of was how fancy and
sophisticated Tkinter GUI's could get.

Anyhow, try 'em both, they're both good.  I don't have a strong
preference for one over the other, but maybe you will.


-- 

Paul Magwene
paul.magwene at yale.edu