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

[jmdeschamps at gmail.com]

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?

Tkinter is certainly dated (?), worst than PMW which is built upon it.

But what do you what/need?
I use , and am making my students use Tkinter for a web multiu-user
client-server XXXX game. The Canvas is a great  object, but you have to
write the code yourself, if you want a special look.
Eye-candy, Tkinter ain't, and it doesn't have a lot of sophisticated
widgets (again ?) .  I wanted a tabbed pane last year and made myself
one (not the exact look of others, but functional if what you want is
multiple frames of widgets for each tab; the table widget took quite a
bit of doing, also and it's not an Excel spreadsheet)

I do know that people are impressed by glitz and glamour (And I don't
have a nice tree (with picture) widget)

But all of this does forget that Tkinter is still in the standard
library, while all others are third-party add-ons... so there is a
extra hassle with them...

So, what do You want? (widgets, criterias etc)

Jean-Marc