Cross-platform GUI app -- Tkinter?

[Steve R. Hastings]

Hello.  I am new to Python, studying books to come up to speed.

I have one question I have not really seen discussed in FAQs and such:

If I want to make a GUI application with menus and such, and I want it to
be easily portable to multiple platforms, what is the best way to do it?
At this point I suspect Tkinter is the way to go.

The reason I'm asking is that I found an expensive Tkinter book that will
be on sale for a couple more days, and if Tkinter is the way to go, I'll
buy that book now.  Normally I would keep reading up on Python until I
could answer the question myself, but I don't want to miss the sale price!

Actually, do I need the expensive book?  Is there a web site you like that
explains Tkinter well?

In a perfect world, I'd like my Python program to be compiled to Java
bytecodes and thus theoretically portable anywhere.  Does the use of
Tkinter make this impossible?  My current understanding, which could be
wrong, is that parts of Tkinter run TCL, so you would need both TCL and
Tkinter installed on a system before a Python program could use Tkinter.
I would like my program to be as self-contained as possible to make it easy
to install.

I know I could use GLADE to design my app, and it would run great in Gtk+
on Linux... if Gtk+ has been made portable to other systems (Win32, Mac)
then Gtk+ might be better for me than Tkinter.

Thanks for any advice.
--
Steve R. Hastings		"Vita est"
steve at hastings.org		http://www.blarg.net/~steveha