Tkinter--does anyone use it for sophisticated GUI development?

[James Stroud]

Kevin Walzer wrote:
> I'm a Tcl/Tk developer who has been working, slowly, at learning Python,
> in part because Python has better support for certain kinds of
> applications that I want to develop than Tcl/Tk does. Naturally, I
> thought that I would use Tkinter as the GUI for these programs. However,
> in doing research into GUI development techniques, sample code, and
> showcase applications, what has struck me is how little sophisticated
> GUI development seems to be done in Tkinter as compared to, say,
> wxPython. I've found plenty of tutorials on how to do basic GUI stuff
> with Tkinter, but that stuff pretty much ends with the core Tk widgets
> (buttons, entry fields, scrollbars, and menu items).
> 
> Coming from Tcl/Tk, where there are a huge number of extension packages
> to enhance the Tk widgets and which allow you to make really polished
> GUI's, I'm struck mainly by how little of this stuff has made it over
> into Tkinter/Python. For instance, I've developed several Tcl
> applications that use the core Tk widgets, the Tile theming package, the
> Bwidget set (great tree widget and listbox, which allows you to embed
> images), and tablelist (an extremely flexible muti-column listbox
> display). I've found Python wrappers for some of this stuff, but almost
> no documentation on how to use them, and very little in the way of
> actual applications making use of them--which is itself a red flag. And
> most of the pure-Python extension stuff that I've found, such as Python
> megawidgets, is pretty dated/ugly and lags far behind the comparable
> stuff on the Tcl side.
> 
> Am I better off biting the bullet and learning wxPython--a different GUI
> paradigm to go with the new language I'm trying to learn? I had hoped to
> reduce my learning curve, but I'm very concerned that I simply can't do
> what I want to do with Tkinter. What do other Tkinter developers think?

Its used in pymol. Also, look at my modest program at passerby.sf.net. 
Not so sophisticated, but not completely simple either.

James


-- 
James Stroud
UCLA-DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics
Box 951570
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.jamesstroud.com/