[Tutor] yet more Tkinter problems (sorry guys)

[Magnus Lycka]

At 23:01 2002-11-21 +1300, Thomi Richards wrote:
> > I'm not at all sure this will be easier in wxPython.
>
>yes, at least from first looks, wxwindows looks more complicated then
>either Tkinter of GTK... is there any reason NOT to learn Tkinter??

No. Learning things are always educational. :)

>I
>mean, people have said that it does things a little differently, but i'm
>guessing that it does the job as well as any other....

Well... all these tool kits have different strengths
and weaknesses. I used to feel that Tkinter had too few
features, and that if you need to add a third party tool
kit such as PMW, you might as well use wxPython. wxPython
certainly offers a lot more features than Tkinter + PMW.

But now, Python comes with Tix included, and that seems
to be the kind of extension Tkinter needs. Still not all the
features of wxPython, but on the other hand it comes with
the standard kit...

I don't know any other GUI tool kit than wxPython well enough
to make any educated comparisions though.

I'd like to write something non-trivial with Tkinter/Tix. For
me, it's fairly important that my software works reliably at
reasoneble costs in both Windows and Linux. That narrows down
the number of tool kits fairly much. QT is expensive on Windows.
I'm sceptical about Gtk on Windows. MFC is out of course. Fox
and FLTK have to little features and too small userbase. That
pretty much leaves Tkinter/Tix and wxPython as the main
contenders.

Having worked with wxPython for over a year now, I have mixed
feelings. Robin Dunn is doing a really good job, both in
development and in community support, but the very fact that he
personally answers most of the non-trivial questions in the
wxpython mailing-list certainly indicates a problem in wxPython.

It must be too difficult to use it right.

I think you are right in saying that it's complicated. It also
seems to me that the development of the C++ version, wxWindows
is a bit chaotic. I'm not involved in that, but that's the
impression I get. A lot of things work, break, work again
and break again as we see new versions coming. A problem here
might be that Robin has based wxPython on non-stable versions
of wxWindows, but that's what we get. Also documentation is not
always in sync with the code. I suggested that the docs should
be included in the source and generated from it, to make it easier
to keep the docs updated, but it seems Julian Smart, the original
developer of wxWindows, opposes that.

A particular problems that makes me worried, and has scared off
other users is the poor handling of non US keyboards. Particularly
in the grid widget.

An interesting development for wxPython is that Mitch Kapor's (he's
the guy who wrote 1-2-3 and founded Lotus Corp) new open source
project will use Python, wxPython, ZODB etc for their MS Outlook
killer. They have hired Robin Dunn for six months, so he will be
working full time on wxPython and wxWindows now. Hopefully that
will improve things. Although his main job seems to be to get the
MacOS X version in shape, so I don't know how much it will mean
for stability and uniformity in the Win32 or GTK versions, or for
documentation.


-- 
Magnus Lycka, Thinkware AB
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