[Tutor] Choice of GUI builders

[Michael Langford]

While some people are Adobe haters("They hate the web...etc"), I think
a slick alternative available now is Flex2 calling python via XMLRPC.

I've been doing so lately. It is fast to pick up and makes slick
looking GUI's rather quickly. It has a cheap GUI builder that actually
works if you don't feel like just typing out MXML files. You can use
Apollo to do desktop apps and just Flex to do web apps, and all the
controls are the same. (The difference is a build setting and a change
to a couple tags, and voila, desktop app is on the web or vice versa).

Bruce Eckel (the thinking in Java Guy) has written an article on this
Approach: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=208528

The ActionScript module I'm currently using for XMLRPC:
http://code.google.com/p/as3python-xmlrpc-lib/

You don't really need to know any ActionScript to do this. Very little
is required to marshal data in and out of the controls. Other then
that, everything is python!

Flex is open source now, so you even have that going for you. And it's
actively maintained (and updated) by Adobe. The install on a client
computer is easier than with wxPython as the GUI toolkit, and I've
done several wxPython apps that needed installers. The python back end
to all this is SimpleXMLRPCServer, which is also, very easy to use.
Exceptions even work well (a big surprise for me). And the fact this
approach is cross platform, for "platform" being defined as Windows,
Linux, Mac, Firefox, IE6, IE7 and Opera, makes this a great choice for
a easy UI toolkit.

         --Michael

On Jan 2, 2008 9:08 AM, Roy Chen <roychenlei at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've been using PythonCard to build a GUI for a simple program I'm trying to write. It's simple and easy to use, and rather intuitive.
>
> However, it seems that it hasn't been updated in some time, and so I would like a recommendation for a cross-platform (preferably) GUI builder. I'm leaning towards wxPython so far (it's had a recent release just a month or so ago), but if anyone has any suggestions, that'd be great.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Roy Chen
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tutor maillist  -  Tutor at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
>
>



-- 
Michael Langford
Phone: 404-386-0495
Consulting: http://www.RowdyLabs.com