Re: Pythonic cross-platform GUI desingers à la Interface Builder (Re: what gui designer is everyone using)

[Kevin Walzer]

On 6/8/12 8:27 AM, Wolfgang Keller wrote:
> What "GUI designer" would come the closest to the way that Cocoa's
> Interface Builder works? I.e. is there any one (cross-platform) that
> allows to actually "connect" the GUI created directly to the code and
> make it available "live" in an IDE?

If you're developing on the Mac, PyObjC allows you to use Interface 
Builder for developing Python apps.

However, there are those of us who are deeply uncomfortable with IB and 
related tools, such as RealBasic and LiveCode/Runtime Revolution. These 
tools make code organization very hard by reducing the amount of code 
written to the point of the UI working by "magic," and/or by breaking up 
your code into little snippets that you can only view by clicking on the 
widget in the UI tool.

A related issue is that using a tool such as this makes you heavily 
dependent on that particular tool, and subject to its developers' 
priorities, release schedule, and bugs. The pace of Xcode 
development--with Apple making frequent changes to project formats in a 
backwards-incompatible way--is an example of this.

One reason I prefer to code UI's by hand is because a) in Tkinter it's 
very easy to do, and b) it allows me to have a much better mental model 
of my code and my app's functionality--I can put everything into as many 
.py files as I need to, and can edit my code with any text editor.

I think these issues are a reason that the slick "drag-and-drop" UI 
builders tend to be developed by commercial software shops to support 
their language and/or IDE, but find little traction among open-source 
developers and languages.

--Kevin

-- 
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com