[Python] wxPython worries

I've got the same worries, but I'm still not really convinced...
boa-constructor is nice... but not there yet


"James Goldwater" <james at eccehomo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:mailman.352.1074092092.12720.python-list at python.org...

Hello Guyon,
There's another free tool:

wxGlade
http://wxglade.sourceforge.net/

Commercial tools:
wxDesigner:
http://www.roebling.de/

DialogBlocks:
http://www.anthemion.co.uk/dialogblocks/

Maybe some of these tools fit your needs. I've no deep experience with
them all. :)

HTH,
Lars

Hello again,

Forgot to mention SPE (uses the mentioned wxGlade):
http://spe.pycs.net/

Maybe this tool is more "IDE"-like. ;)

Regards,
Lars

I share your concerns with wxPython - it's a good, powerful toolkit, but
it lacks consistent and clear documentation, and a decent screen painter
(wxGlade probably is the most complete).

If you have the budget (USD 399 per developer), you may want look at
BlackAdder from The Kompany. It uses the PyQt bindings for the Qt
toolkit, which I find to be a bit better than wxPython/wxWindows, a bit
more polished and consistent. The package includes the BlackAdder
editor, the QtDesigner, PyQt docs and a license to redistribute the PyQt
libraries for win32 (which is really what you're paying for - most of
this is available for free on GPL'ed systems).

Another option is to extend/embed Python with Delphi; specifically, use
Delphi for the GUI, and Python for the logic. There's some Delphi
bindings and documentation here:

http://membres.lycos.fr/marat/delphi/python.htm
http://www.atug.com/andypatterns/pythonDelphiTalk.htm

None of the Python GUI toolkits support making good custom controls as
well as Java and .NET do. TKinter is probably the best Python option
for that. If you are comfortable with Windows programming though,
wxPython will not be too difficult.
If you want something similar to Delphi or .NET, then you would
probably like QT Designer much better than the wx options. See
BlackAdder (Win, $$) or eric3 (Linux, free):
http://www.thekompany.com/products/blackadder/
http://www.die-offenbachs.de/detlev/eric3.html

If money isn't an issue though, just stick with Visual Studio and C#
and let the other guy do most of the work.

It's not the RADdish-ness (is that a word?) - drag'n'drop, property
assignment etc - that concerns me, it's the ease of gui building - by
hand is fine (oh how I've come to 'love' Java's layout managers...)

Custom controls is the biggie then. I think I'll have a punt at building
a custom control in wxPython to see if it's even feasible. Anybody want
an arbitrary-angled triangular-wedge button? (My first custom control
in Delphi version 1, all those years back...)

PT wrote:

I'll make my usual comment, which is that nobody has yet contradicted
me (unusual on USENET ;-) that Qt is the most well-designed Python GUI
framework. (Qt Designer is very good, too.)

And, strangely, the PyQt commercial license is far cheaper than (C++)
Qt. $400 for former (Blackadder, from theKompany.com), $2500-odd for
the latter!

(before somebody asks: no, you *don't* need both licenses -- only the
cheap one from theKompany, who have an agreement with trolltech)

I believe Blackadder comes with Python-specific docs for PyQt, but
they're actually completely redundant, IMHO -- it's trivial to
translate the C++ docs to Python code, using the list of exceptions
distributed with PyQt. Another BTW: their FAQ page still says
Blackadder is in beta, but I think somebody here mentioned the final
version was actually released some while back (PyQt itself has been
stable for years, of course).

[...]

PyQt is certainly good at this.


John

I'll second that, and go as far as to say it's a very good GUI framework
no matter how you speak to it.
$400 is for preofessional use. For personal use, it's $80, but you lose
the right to distribute your apps (but maybe not if you release them
under the GPL - I should look into that).
You do get a copy of the docs with your BA purchase. The Kompany also
sells the PyQt docs separately for $20 for a one-time purchase, or $70
for a yearly subscription; that is, all updates for one year are included.

Another BTW: their FAQ page still says
It is indeed stable. The one thing I don't like about BlackAdder is
BlackAdder itself, the editor portion. It's not terrible - it just
doesn't behave quite like I expect a dedicated Python editor to behave.
I usually create my GUI in the Qt Designer, and then edit the Python
stuff in Eric (Linux) or SciTE (win32).

I love Delphi but I would choose Python for simplicity, flexibility and
library (will not mention that it works on AS/400, the best
minicomputer(!) ever made).

But I'm rather guerilla guy and mainstream makes me sick.

(NP: The Pogues - Sally MacLennane)

Why is it the best minicomputer ever made?
I really want to know!

Since nobody ever produced any other. Only IBM produced machines that
can be called "midrange" (something between microcomputer and "real
computer", the famous S/390 mainframe). They still use this terminology.

>>
Jarek> Since nobody ever produced any other. Only IBM produced machines
Jarek> that can be called "midrange" (something between microcomputer
Jarek> and "real computer", the famous S/390 mainframe). They still use
Jarek> this terminology.

You seem to be forgetting (at least) DEC's VAX line of computers. Data
General and PR1ME had computers classed as "mini" computers also. I'm sure
there were others.

Skip

In article <bu6l68$8uv$1 at atlantis.news.tpi.pl>,
Jarek Zgoda wrote:
.
.
.
Sneaky, Jarek; but there were a LOT of "minicomputer"
manufacturers, including DEC, Data General, HP, Prime,
...

Oops! It seems I'm too young to make such authoritative statements, my
adventure with computers started in mid-80's. So, please, take my
apologies for inconvenience.

Jarek ....

Honeywell also produced a line of mid-range machines
called the Level 6 minicomputers ....

These machines ran an operating system
which had an internal architecture
and command line interface different from,
but vaguely similar, to Multics, a Honeywell mainframe OS ....

Multics was a major predecessor of Unix,
a euphemism for Multics Without Balls
deemed so by the original developers themselves ....

Without Multics there might not be
any such thing as Unix or Linux ....

You can find the history of Multics at ....

http://www.multicians.org

HP/3000, taken off the sales list last Halloween.

A joy to work with.

Believe it or not, it was ported to run as a UNIX emulator in the '80s,
so it could be available forever, but HP's politics killed it.

Gresham's law applied to computing: bad software drives out good.
(Perl vs Python, et cetera, et cetera).

OS-wise an incredible innovative and visionary machine,
programming-wise you had .NET (read as: multi-language
runtime-environment) since more than a decade. unequaled productivity
for business application development with the usual triple
dialog-processing - business logic - database.

if only it had more cool ILE-languages than RPG, CL, Cobol and a
poorly supported C/C++.

btw.: there is even a python port for the AS/400, but even if CL as
ugly as a nightmare it can't be beaten in terms of productivity on an
AS/400.

Yes, htpp://www.iseriespython.com/. Discovery of existence of Python for
iSeries made me switch back to AS/400 from Unix.

What is needed is a good "Programming wxPython"!

I have recently been trying to build some GUIs with wxWindows. The
first problem that I ran across involved not being able to send and
event from a worker thread to the GUI thread and get the GUI thread to
process the event while the user had a menu pulled down. I wrote a
bug report and this has since been fixed. Tkinter has issues here
also. There is no means for a worker thread to put an event in the
GUI thread.

The second problem that I have run across is that tab order between
controls is the order that controls are added. You can't get tabbing
to skip a control. If you dynamically add/remove controls you can't
achieve your desired tab order.

wxWindows seems like a very impressive work. The demo is certainly
impressive. I also suppose I shouldn't rant to much about something
that is free. However my first two GUIs hit critical problems, and
these were really simple GUIs. Granted, the first problem has been
fixed now, and I have not yet written a bug report on the second.

Tkinter is also giving me problems. I have been trying to add
controls to a canvas and to have a scrollbar that will scroll the
controls on the canvas. I think I have it figured out now, but it is
damn near impossible to figure out from the documentation. I had to
scour the internet looking for solutions.

I have also played with displaying video in both wxWindows and Tk.
I have raw gray scale data simply as a list of values range 0-255.
Using PIL I can easily convert to a format wxWindows and Tk can
display. I get around 30 fps with wxWindows and 15 fps with Tk.
However, all images wxWindows displays must be full 24-bit color. If
the images didn't need to be expanded to (r,g,b) I would expect
signifcant speed up. I don't know why Tk is so much slower.

wxWindows and Tk are the only toolkits that wrap native Windows
controls. The others all emulate controls. I am thinking about
trying out another toolkit.
FOX, FLTK or GTK.

I am having enough trouble convincing people to use Python. I'd never
be able to get my work to purchase Qt. They would prefer to do
everything in VB6.

Hi,
I have recently evaluated wxpython because I am coming from fox (for 3 years)
, but fox lacks GUI designer and wxwindows with wxpython and boa-constructor
seems to solve the problem

Thanks for your advice in wxwindows.

If you want informations about fox I can help you.

Best Regards
steph

MetalOne wrote:
[snip]
We've successively used the event_generate method on Tkinter widgets from worker
threads to communicate with the main thread. You can also have less
straightforward solutions involving the main thread regularly checking for a
Queue or Event (using the after method) to get events from the worker threads.
So you definitely can't say there's "no means" to do it. But it's clearly not as
easy as it should.

[snip]
The documentation is clearly the main problem with Tkinter. It's not really that
there's not enough, but useful information must be gathered from too many places...

The best places are:
- For beginners, "Thinking in Tkinter" from Stephen Ferg:
http://www.ferg.org/thinking_in_tkinter/index.html
- Tkinter demos in the Python distribution: unfortunately one of Tkinter's best
kept secrets. Just go to <Python root>/Demo/tkinter and look at the scripts.
I've learnt a lot from them, even if they're far from perfect (where on earth
did they get the idea to make all their application inherit from Frame?!)
- "An introduction to Tkinter" from Fredrik Lundh:
http://www.pythonware.com/library/tkinter/introduction/index.htm - very useful,
but unfortunately incomplete...
- And finally the man pages for tcl/tk: http://www.tcl.tk/man/ - only useful
once you've practiced a bit, since you must know how to translate tcl/tk to
Python/Tkinter to be able to use it.

The book "Python and Tkinter programming" from John Grayson seems interesting,
but I never used it myself. You can get an idea of its contents and download the
example scripts here: http://www.manning.com/grayson/

HTH

On Friday 16 January 2004 04:57 MetalOne wrote in
<92c59a2c.0401152257.5b93167b at posting.google.com>:
I think that ranting is good *IF* it has a bug report to the
developers to back it up.

Developers can't imagine all the uses people will do from their work
and they need to know what happened when you tried doing something so
that they can help you: fixing the problem, pointing another way of
doing it or even saying that it can't be done and making you stop
loosing your time trying to figure out what you can do :-)


With regards to the notebooks page, have you seen that there are two
methods: AddPage and InsertPage? With InsertPage you can specify the
position where the page is to be inserted, putting them on the
desired order. But I don't know if you already tried that and it
didn't do what you expected...


Be seeing you,

GTK2 is worth looking at if you're writing a complex GUI and are
worried about running into problems with wx's wrapper approach
and small differences between what the underlying widgets support.
It's fairly complex and probably has a steeper learning curve, but
has a nice design. I'm continuously amazed at what I can write on
one OS and run w/o problems on others.

On Windows, you will want to use the gtk-wimp theme, which makes
it look and act more like native Windows apps (via emulation):

http://gtk-wimp.sourceforge.net/

There are various GUI builders for GTK but I've found writing
the GUI code manually to be easy enough to do.

If you try to use it and need to build from sources, let me know
and I'll share some Python scripts that make building on Windows
(and other platforms) easier.

Stephan Deibel