Re: [Anygui-devel] On AnyGUI Core

[Greg E. <gre...@ca...>]

Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:

> One option to look out for in the future is Greg's PyGUI:
> 
>   http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python_gui

Peter seems to be suggesting more or less implementing a
complete GUI in Python. That would ensure that it worked
on all platforms, but there are difficulties with this
approach, which is what things like wxWidgets and Qt do.
They never seem to look and behave exactly like the
native widgets on a given platform, and they're always
playing catch-up with changes in the native look and feel.

I also have performance concerns about doing it all in
Python. I expect it would be very difficult, for example,
to implement a pure-Python rich text editor that was
as featureful and efficient as those available nowadays
in many of the native GUI packages.

With PyGUI, I'm taking almost the opposite approach,
and trying to make as much use as I can of what is
natively provided on the plaform. Like Anygui, PyGUI
aims to provide a common API to the Python programmer,
implemented in terms of different underlying libraries.
But unlike Anygui, I'm not trying to wrap every GUI
toolkit in existence, but just provide *one* high-quality
implementation on each platform, built as directly as
possible on the platform's native facilities.

That way, I hope to avoid the worst of the lowest-common-
denominator problems that Anygui has, leverage as much
power as I can from the underlying platform facilities,
and avoid requiring the user to install any large,
unwieldy and potentially buggy third-party libraries.

Greg