GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Brian Blais]

On Jun 9, 2010, at 7:16 , ant wrote:

> 1 Although a few advocates of Tkinter have spoken in favour of it,
> most seem to think that:
>     It's not particularly elegant, either in its use or its
> implementation with Tcl/Tk
>     Not many people use it anyway, so why bother?
>
> 2 Most people who have used a GUI have some investment in it. So
> arguments about which one is best tend to be
>   partial and not wonderfully constructive.

In this whole discussion, I haven't seen anyone mention wax (http:// 
zephyrfalcon.org/labs/wax_primer.html)

I know that it is not being supported anymore, but the philosophy is  
something we can get behind.  I have done a fair amount of GUI  
programming, and from my personal experience tkinter seems a bit  
clunky, and there are some really annoying things (like running a  
program from the commandline in OS X which launches a GUI has the  
window appear *behind* the terminal program) which make it  
impractical for my personal use.  Up until recently Qt had odd  
license issues, so I leaned toward wx which does not have a very nice  
python interface.  Much of wax, however, is a thin wrapper around wx,  
and is usable even now and is much easier and much more pythonic.

The nice thing about it is that, being a thin wrapper, you can have  
all of the power of wx if you want to.  From a work-flow standpoint I  
often find myself doing everything in wax and then running into a  
part of wx that hasn't been wrapped, so I use the ugly wx code within  
my wax code for a while and later make the wrapper clean.

I wonder if that sort of philosophy would work: a really nice and  
clear, pythonic wrapper around a sophisticated, complex, and complete  
GUI framework.  It should be thin enough that the underlying GUI  
library can be called directly, however, or its usefulness will be  
greatly diminished.  Depending on how it is designed, it might even  
be possible to have a multi-framework wrapping, so that someone could  
have a Qt-based wrapper, and another using the same module choose to  
have it wrap wx.

I think the codebase for wax would be a very nice start to the  
discussion, because it is already almost usable. It is already very  
close to what I would consider an ideal GUI framework.

> 5 I should stop pontificating, and write code. If it's better than the
> existing, people will use it and it will
>   become the standard.

I guess that answers that one!   :)


				bb
-- 
Brian Blais
bblais at bryant.edu
http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais
http://bblais.blogspot.com/