Python GUIs

[Carri]

Hey everyone,

Considering doing a Python-based project for my final year project..

Just wondering: If anyone has used Python for GUI development and if
anyone has any recommendations?

Thanks,

Carri

[David Markey]

I got a license of Komodo IDE. Seems good.

However I always keep going back to Vim and ipdb....

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[Jaime Buelta]

Hi:

  I've used PyGTK for a couple of projects and it's quite simple to use. You can check it on http://www.pygtk.org/

  Best regards,

    Jaime Buelta

[John Keyes]

Hi Carri,

I used wxPython[1] in the past. It worked very well for
most of the things I needed it to do.

-John

[1] http://www.wxpython.org/

[Michael Thompson]

On 2 November 2011 09:44, Carri <caroline...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've used Qt and PySide for developing GUI's that ran on Windows and Linux. The resulting app can be bundled into a windows exe and distributed. QtDesigner can be used for putting together the GUI.

QML also looked good, for touch screen UIs, but the future for these technologies is looking uncertain since Nokia's switch to Microsoft. 

Michael

[Michael Connors]

I have used WX, GTK and QT. 

I would recommend  QT. I found it the easiest to work with, and the most attractive to look at.

[Paul Barry]

A question I always ask my students at this point is "Can you use HTML
as your GUI?".

It's worth considering...

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[Jaime Buelta]

That's a very good question, Paul ;-)

[Michael Thompson]

On 2 November 2011 10:00, Paul Barry <paul.jam...@gmail.com> wrote:

A question I always ask my students at this point is "Can you use HTML
as your GUI?".

It's worth considering...

Qt supports quite a nice hybrid approach where you can embed a web browser as the main window serving local or remote html and javascript. You can then write callbacks in python\C++ that javascript can call, giving you the best of both worlds.

Michael

[Michael Connors]

On 2 November 2011 11:00, Paul Barry <paul.jam...@gmail.com> wrote:

A question I always ask my students at this point is "Can you use HTML
as your GUI?".

It's worth considering...

Actually, if you need to have a desktop app, but would prefer to use HTML and CSS for your layout, QT provides a very good WebView widget.  

[Paul Barry]

And I'm pretty sure that the Python for Android technology (and SL4A)
supports WebView... so now your "app" is capable of running on Android
devices, too. :-)

[Carri]

In the past I've used Cheetah and CherryPy.

I haven't eliminated using html, but I intend to investigate my options before settling on one.

QT looks promising.. 

Research time. :) 

Thanks everyone.  

On 2 November 2011 10:10, Michael Connors <conn...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Shaun Laughey]

I'll add my +1 for HTML as the GUI. Especially if you can use HTML5 for the presentation layer.

But for applications that need to run on Windows and must be a packaged exe then I'm a QT fan and user.

Although wxwindows is great to knock something up quickly.

I'll mention PyGame too. Because no one else has and it has the capability to produce some unique interfaces. May be a bit too low level though.

Regards,
Shaun Laughey

On 2 November 2011 10:10, Michael Connors <conn...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Michael Connors]

On 2 November 2011 11:14, Carri <caroline...@gmail.com> wrote:

In the past I've used Cheetah and CherryPy.

Personally I think that if you have done web-development in Python before, and it is for a student project then why not have a go at desktop development in Python? 

I am sure it is worth knowing in the long term, even if just to be able to make an informed decision for a future project.

[Daniel Kersten]

If you can use a web-based GUI, I'd probably recommend doing that. However, if you want to do a native GUI, my choice would be PyQt:

I've done GUI development in Python with both PyGTK and PyQt/PySide (and in C++ with GTK, Qt, FOX and Wx). While both have their merits, I personally would recommend PyQt over PyGTK.

Qt is a powerful and full featured framework, has a visual GUI designer (QtDesigner), has an extremely rich set of widgets (and a number of ways to build your own custom widgets), has MVC-based data view widgets (treeview, grid view, list view) which is capable of dealing with large amounts of data, a very powerful graphics system, you can style widgets using CSS and, IMHO, above all else, the signal-slots mechanism makes communicating between widgets super easy.

Having said all that, I think the future of Qt is in QML, which is a JSON-like language for describing a GUI declaratively (like HTML, only cleaned up). With QML, you can then code the logic in Javascript. QML and QWidget-based Qt interfaces can also be mixed - you can embed QWidgets inside QML and QML inside a QWidget interface. I've done this a few times when using Qt with C++.

I have also used Qt to embed a WebKit based web browser and doing the bulk of the GUI in HTML and Javascript in the past and this has worked very well for me. 

Bottom line, unless you want to go with a pure HTML/JS GUI, Qt gives you a lot of options and, in my opinion, is easier to use and seems a little more modern (and the GUI looks more native on windows and OS X) than GTK.

[Daniel Kersten]

Since Shaun mentioned PyGame, I will mention Pyglet, which is very similar to PyGame. You could make a GUI in both of these, but as Shaun said, it would be very low level compared to the GUI frameworks.

You could also use librocket, which is game middleware for creating game GUIs in HTML and CSS and has some kind of Python scripting interface, though I have never tried it and don't know if you need some C++ to get it running or if you can do everything from Python.

http://librocket.com/wiki/frontend/features