[Chicago] desktop development

[Tal Liron]

I've done desktop GUI applications professionally for more than a 
decade, and worked with almost every GUI framework you ever heard of, 
from various versions of Windows, X, Java, mobile platforms, etc., and 
can say that using PyGTK has been the most pleasurable dev experience in 
this domain. Strongly recommend it for pure dev joy, though I know that 
GTK is not easily available on all platforms.


If there's a gotcha in it, it's that it's important to learn how to work 
with GTK (and any GUI framework's!) event queue. For anything but the 
most trivial desktop app, you'll want to do multithreading, which will 
always conflict in strange ways with the GUI framework -- things might 
seem to work sometimes, but unless you're following the rules, you'll 
get weird hangs, redraw issues, etc. (There are some very good reasons 
for GUI frameworks being singe-threaded: read up on it if you're 
interested.)


For what it's worth, I also believe that GUI and command line utilities 
are Python's best domains. I do not find CPython to be an acceptable 
server platform, despite its popularity in that domain.


-Tal


On 12/03/2010 05:44 PM, David Kim wrote:

> most of my work involves developing desktop applications on windows. 
> hence i've been doing mostly .net c#.
>
> like many of you, i have a great liking toward python and would like 
> to know if any of you successfully deployed large scale desktop 
> application using python with any on the ui toolkits.
>
> if so, recommendations? gotchas? lessons learned?
>
> also, would python be a viable choice for building software that may 
> be "shrink wrapped" and sold?
>
> dave
>
>
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