GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[lkcl]

On Jun 12, 3:07 pm, Kevin Walzer <k... at codebykevin.com> wrote:
> On 6/12/10 9:44 AM, lkcl wrote:
>
> >   that's not quite true - you can create a simple core which is easily
> > extensible with third party contributions to create more comprehensive
> > widgets.
>
> That's exactly the design philosophy of Tk: a small core widget set
> (recently expanded somewhat with the ttk widgets) and an API that is
> easily extensible, either at the script level (megawidgets, cf. using an
> entry widget and a listbox to build a combobox) or at the C level (more
> complex, but hardly impossible).

 thank you for pointing this out, kevin.  learned a lot today, just
from reading this one thread.  about msg no 170 was where  mention of
tk libraries for opengl, and various other types of highly
sophisticated widgets were mentioned.

 personally i think that these third party comprehensive extras alone
make the answer to "should there be a replacement for python-tcl/tk" a
resounding "no" but then i don't really need to say that - we kinda
know the answer's "no" anyway :)


> I've used a browser-based app before (Adobe AIR app running in IE) and
> while it wasn't horrible, I certainly did not prefer it to a native
> desktop app: I got sick of waiting for the app to reload because of a
> slow network connection.

 yeahh, adobe AIR is basically webkit.  not entirely sure what else
they did with it - extended it to include their much-abused version of
ecmascript (aka actionscript).  never really been that interested in
it, being a pythonistaaaa myself :)  i think there's something about
flash/AIR apps that just grates against the nerves.  it doesn't really
matter what reasons people come up with - it just feels... "wrong".

 that's not to say, however, based on that _one_ leveraging of browser-
based web-app technology, that _all_ browser-based web-app technology
falls into the same "feels wrong" bucket.  coming back to pyjamas
(again - sorry!) as an example:
  http://bit.ly/9xZ3MZ

 take a look at maxima's reply: you can clearly see that he's nuts
about pyjd, and finds it to be slightly scarily wonderful for GUI
development.  perhaps it's because it's pythaaaaan, and free software-
based, not adobe-driven, i don't know.

 *shrug* :)

 l.