The beauty of pyGTK and Glade is they have opened up cross-platform, professional-quality GUI development to those of us who’d rather be doing other things but who still need a GUI on top of it all. Not only does pyGTK allow neophytes to create great GUIs, it also allows professionals to create flexible, dynamic and powerful user interfaces faster than ever before. Read the article at LinuxJournal.
A Beginner’s Guide to Using pyGTK and Glade
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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So many GUI toolkits to choose from. For all you Python developers out there, which is your favorite and why?
Also, a little OT, but ….
I’ve seriously been thinking about learning Python as a cross-platform replacement for VB, and I’m wondering if Python has an equivalent for perl’s libwww module? Also, how good is ot compared to libwww?
I have the same thought as you– I am a VB hack who is looking at Python for what’s next. wxPython came highly recommended to me. I’ve worked with Tkinter and the article is right– it’s kind of ugly. I must confess that I don’t know much about pyGTK, but wxPython is also based on GTK+. I’ve downloaded and installed wxPython and Boa Constructor (an IDE based on wxPython), and I think it looks promising. Lots of widgets, frames, and other parts to work with, and once you understand the overall structure of wxPython programs, it’s easy to work with.
but wxPython is also based on GTK+
I thought it was based on wxWindows ?
Under Unix, wxWindows is wrapped around GTK+, so you can say that wxPython is ultimately, wrapped around GTK+ too.
There’s a project called Anygui (http://anygui.sourceforge.net/).
From their front page:
“The purpose of the Anygui project is to create an easy-to-use, simple, and generic module for making graphical user interfaces in Python. Its main feature is that it works transparently with many different GUI packages on most platforms.”
As far as GUI toolkits go, wxPython is one of the nicest I’ve ever used. You can pretty much just borrow from the included example program to construct any GUI your imagination can conjure up. It’s great that it’s cross platform while maintaining a native look and feel. Under Windows you can also use py2exe to wrap it all up into a standalone executable.
There’s a project called Anygui (http://anygui.sourceforge.net/).
From their front page:
“The purpose of the Anygui project is to create an easy-to-use, simple, and generic module for making graphical user interfaces in Python. Its main feature is that it works transparently with many different GUI packages on most platforms.”
A lot of promises, but less real activity.
I was looking for a VB replacement using Python, but still without luck.
-wxWindows&wxPython: ~3MB of wrapper just to get native GUI on Windows?
-pyGTK: Besides the overload (almost the same as wx) you get not so native looking widgets (even using GTK-WIMP)
-PythonWin: the one that come with win32all, for the ones MFC-geeks out there (I’m not one).
-Venster: the most win32 low level wrapper I now, trully native, but with ugly Win32 API over it.
Yeah, there is PythonCard, which wrap wxPython, which encapsulate wxWindows… then you get natives widgets… get the picture.
Ohh, almost forgot, the most simple “sample” app uses 12MB of ram… nice.
Anygui should get a bit of community support, enhance the user way of creating apps, not asking for RAD tools, but a way to separate UI design from app code (I like the resources concept used by almost every win32 app).
Just my .06 cents.
“wxWindows&wxPython: ~3MB of wrapper just to get native GUI on Windows?”
And Linux, and OS X, as a one time download. Come on, you’re getting a simple language which will give you a native look and feel on three different platforms. I’d consider a real python biting me every time I opened up an editor for it to be a small price to pay for that!
Don’t bite, they strangle
What do you consider to be native on Linux ?
And Linux, and OS X, as a one time download. Come on, you’re getting a simple language which will give you a native look and feel on three different platforms.
Maybe my comment wasn’t clear, my opinions are related to provide the final user a “click-n-run” program on any of the plataform, without them needing to address issues like: installing python, wxpython, etc.
The 90% of the time I develop programs, are targeted to users and not developers, where you should take care of evertyhing, from the installation steps to the whole experience.
I know that in the linux world, you already have these tools installed, but that is what I don’t like of Linux: all that fat hanging-out, even if you never use a wxPython proggy.
Luis