[Python-Dev] What to choose to replace Tkinter?

[Charles G Waldman]

David Ascher writes:
 > 
 > That said, Mozilla does have a fairly strong vision for the future, allows
 > some of the benefits of the web technologies to transfer to the GUI world
 > (designers, not coders, can do the UI work).

Sounds great for the future, but I want to inject a few of my
unsolicated, opinionated observations - today, in 2000, the Mozilla
stuff is *far* from usable.  If you want to produce nice, professional
looking GUI apps which fit nicely with the desktop (rather that having
their own completely different look-and-feel) it's hard to beat Gtk+
or Tkinter.  Tkinter is still quite viable, especially if
cross-plaform support is important.  Some of the examples in Grayson's
book are quite beautiful.  It will be a long time until
XPFE/XUL/whatchamacallit gets to this level of viability.

Also consider that Sun (and HP?) now ship Gnome by default, rather
than CDE (or so I hear, anyway).  I predict that Gnome compatibility
will become more and more of a desirable feature.

Evidence of the above is the "Galeon" project.  It's widely perceived
that Mozilla has a nice rendering engine (Gecko) wrapped up in a
dreadful GUI (XPFE).  So the Galeon project places the Gecko engine
inside a Gtk+/Gnome GUI, which provides a much more pleasant user
experience.

There's also a (preliminary) port of Gtk+ to Win32:
http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/

And, finally, IMO, the work being done on PyGtk is of high quality.
I'm using it currently in production code.