Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Peter D. <pd...@gm...>]

On Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:18:28 +0300, David McNab <da...@re...>  
wrote:

> Peter Damoc wrote:
>> Hello list,
>>
>> I've been looking around at python GUI toolkits just for fun and I came
>> across AnyGUI.
>> It is very impressive but I think it solves the wrong problem. Let me
>> explain myself:
> 8><
>
> Agreed - AnyGui by its nature is vulnerable to countless environmental
> quirks. If it had a large, organised and devoted development and
> maintenance team, it would probably cope well. But it would take a lot
> of resources to prevent the endless "it's not working on <linux distro  
> x>"

this is why I think is better to just reimplement the low level. Wrapping  
the toolkits might be too much, especialy for a small team

>> As a programmer I would like to have is an OSS python GUI toolkit that
>> looks great everywhere and acts the same on all platforms without
>> custom  hack in the app code.
>
> PyQT is worth a look. However, that carries the cost of Qt's weird
> windows licensing quirks.

PyQT follows QT and... some people might not want to invest in something  
that will allow the to create *only* GPL OpenSource. Where I live 6000$ is  
about the sallary for 2 years for some people. Not an option.

>> There is currently no such thing
>
> True, but (IMHO) the PMW/Tkinter combination comes very close
> (http://pmw.sourceforge.net).

anything Tkinter makes me thing at ugly GUIs.... sure that might be a  
whimsical thing but.... a lot of beginners look at this.

>> and my little mind cannot understand why.
>> Ok... so its a lot of work to create such a thing
>
> Creating such a thing is relatively straightforward. Making it practical
> - easily learned, easy to setup and use, and respectful of resources
> takes about 5-50 times that amount of work again.

build it and they will come. Once done the proof of concept... maybe  
someone will come and optimize the low-end stuff just to demonstrate that  
it can.

> There's a lot of good gui libs, but they're hard to understand unless
> you're willing to study the implementation's source code, or even live
> with the developer and suck the pizza stains off his/her T-shirt.

Not true, I have a fair experience with wxPython and is not that hard BUT  
it does not allow skinning, and it feels heavy, packaged exe are rather  
big... and most importantly...  a lot of low level bugs surface from the  
C++ part.

> Please do have a serious try of Tkinter, with the PMW classes over the
> top. I've been there, from scared gui neophyte to someone that can build
> smart, platform-independent guis - all the pain and labour you put into
> learning Tkinter, you will recoup in joy and satisfaction as your apps
> Simply Just Work. Tkinter-based progs also package well into windows
> standalone EXE packages (eg Py2EXE), so you can spare your users the
> confusion of installing/setting up their own Python environment.
>
> Cheers
> David

Thanks for your reply, will take a look at PMW.

Peter.