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

[Charles G Waldman]

David Ascher writes:

 >cgw> There's also a (preliminary) port of Gtk+ to Win32:
 >cgw> http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/
 > 
 > FWIW, the last time I checked, this was useless.

That's what I meant by "preliminary" ;-)

 > I don't mean to diss GTK, just pointing out that cross-platform solutions
 > are important to a whole lot of communities (Python included).

Right.  Cross-platform is very important, but so is native
look-and-feel, and this is where (IMO) XPFE falls flat on its face.
Something like WxWindows, which uses Gtk+ on *nix and MFC (?) on Win,
seems like it could be a real winner.  If the x-platform GUI doesn't
use native dialog boxes and filechoosers, users REALLY notice this and
they will just hate it.  (Yes, this is based on observations of actual
paying customers).

I have a little bit of experience with cross-platform development -
having used a lot of these tools - at my last job, after evaluating
just about everything, we bought into (against my advice!) a doomed
commercial product called Visix Galaxy (for which I immediately
created a set of Python bindings).  The problem with all of these
things, of course, is that the more cross-platform they are, the more
"lowest-common-denominator" they are forced to become.

Tkinter, with widgets like Canvas, was really pretty amazing - for its
day - feature-rich *and x-platform.  But even this broke down if you
started using fancy features like drawing with dashed lines - works on
X, not on Windows (last time I checked, anyway) - the more you start
pushing the limits of the toolkit, the more the portability breaks
down.

Tkinter-is-dead-long-live-Tkinter'ly yrs, 
				     -C