[BangPypers] What are you using for developing desktop GUIs?

[Gopalakrishnan Subramani]

We needed Desktop apps as our apps are based on Hardware interfacing, ie
Density, Pressure, Flow etc measuring transmitters and control devices.
Those devices use the special industrial protocols and each protocols has
its own advantages, need specific device drivers based on vendors. Desktop
based solution is 100% expected in this cases.
Now we make these Desktop apps as web enabled, that can connect to cloud
for data backup or remote connectivity, iphone etc.  Web Enabled is not web
only option.

There are cases that web/internet may not work inside food
processing/chemical/refineries industries or you may not get either WIFI or
2G/3G not working due to external interferences such as noise, frequency,
heat, gas, air pressure etc.

We have cross platform app that works on Windows (.NET), iOS and Android.
But that is not build using HTML/CSS/JS instead we use Lua as a common
language and we code up each platform to have top level  application in
native technologies and then use Lua heavily as glue, cross platform. This
means, we cannot write everything in Lua, but we can balance between native
technologies (Objective C, Java, C#) and cross platform application.

Web only is not always reliable, External factors such as network
connectivity, modem/routers, bandwidth/speed, latency, fail over and many
other stuffs can affect reliability. There are mission critical apps that
still needs to work offline/Desktop. For social apps like facebook or
twitter or even linkedin and many other social apps, web only option may be
good.

Building native (native as native) desktop apps using HTML5/CSS/(JS or
Python) may not be too long, we need to come out of browser security
levels, exposure to local resources to OS kernel/user/gdi objects shall
help us to make apps in Desktop only. Mobile world is leading in this
initiatives, Desktop world is far behind now.






On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 12:43 AM, Rushabh Mehta <rmehta at gmail.com> wrote:

> Its 2013 and I think its interesting people still want to write desktop
> apps. If you are already highly skilled in desktop GUIs then it probably
> makes sense, but browser is definitely the most portable environment for
> the future. For *most* cases, its usually better that the app is web by
> default. There are so many open source libraries (widgets, charting
> engines, UI frameworks) to choose from, so many services to plug in (Maps,
> Analytics etc) that its a no brainer even for scientific applications. The
> canvas for the web is just a whole lot wider.
>
> Deployment is still an issue, but thanks to broadband - VMs have become
> the easiest way to evaluate / deploy web apps.
>
>
> On 28-Sep-2013, at 12:21 AM, bangpypers-request at python.org wrote:
>
> >
> > I guess YMMV but if a local app launches a web server and a browser to
> > get things done, it's a deal breaker for me.
> >
>
>
> In this case starting a web server can be nothing more than executing a few
> hundreds of lines of python code that just happens to talk http and wsgi.
> It is more of a mental block than anything! I know because I had to fight
> it too :) The user does not need to know or care.
>
> Interacting with a browser tab is likely to be a bit more of a hurdle,
> particularly if the user opens your app twice and ends up with two browser
> tabs with your app, etc. It is certainly a possibility that some users will
> feel a bit disoriented.
>
> _______________________________________________
> BangPypers mailing list
> BangPypers at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
>