[Twisted-Python] wxWindows vs Gtk

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Tue Apr 23 20:22:46 MDT 2002


On Tuesday, April 23, 2002, at 08:08 PM, Donovan Baarda wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 12:39:38PM -0500, Jason Asbahr wrote:
>>
>> I've used wxPython on Windows and I like it -- it produces a GUI that
>> looks and feels like users expect it should.  It was easy to work with
>> and had all the features I needed for that project.  I haven't tried it
>> on other platforms -- curious to hear reports from anyone who has.  The
>> fact that it runs on Mac OS X (as the wxDesigner screenshots attest :-)
>> is a big plus.
>
> I've been down the GUI+Python research path a while ago. There is 
> quite a
> bit of info on wxWindows and Python, but perhaps most significant is 
> that
> pretty much the only reason why wxWindows has not replaced Tk as the
> standard Python GUI is platform support, in particular Mac. Last time I
> looked, wxWindows+Mac was getting there, but not yet.

I don't know about its support for Mac OS9, but as far as Mac OS X goes 
it seems to be very far along.  It did have some assertion errors when 
running the demo, about a missing menu resource, but they were 
nonfatal.  I think it did crash once when I tried to close something, 
but nonetheless it seemed to be pretty far along.  Visually it looked 
pretty damn close to correct, some of the spacing on the buttons was a 
little off, but even IE has problems with that.  This is from the latest 
CVS, so any of these errors could be works in progress.  The Aqua 
version of Tk isn't really that great either, I've seen it crash and 
I've seen a lot of visual errors.

>
> I believe even Guido did a test project using both wxWindows and Tk, and
> came to the conclusion wxWindows was easyer to develop with, faster, 
> looked
> nicer, etc.
>
> GTK+Glade is a nice combo for working on linux, but portability issues 
> on
> Windoze and Mac pretty much count it out for me.
>

I've done gtk+glade for linux, it works pretty well.. except for the 
fact that the glade tool is terrible to use, I spent more time  fighting 
bugs in the glade designer than it would've taken for me to mock it up 
in gimp/photoshop and then do the XML or python code by hand.

> Tk is still a contender just because of it's age.
>
> wxWindows+Boa Constructor would be my tool of choice for a new GUI 
> project.
> Boa is still pretty beta, but amazingly functional considering how 
> quick it
> was developed.

I don't have experience with Boa Constructor, but it sounds like it's 
better off than glade, from my experience with that ;)

>
> Things like Qt I didn't really look at, probably because I'm still 
> license
> shy for no logical reason.
>

Qt's license is great for X11, but I'm not willing to pay > $1000 (per 
developer+platform combination) to use it for open source work on 
anything else, it really leaves it in a worse spot than GTK or 
wxWindows.  I'd rather donate that money to the wxWindows team or to 
have the GUI portion rewritten with a native library.

-bob





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