On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 01:47:25PM +1000, Gareth Walters wrote:
> 
> I have been using wxPython (http://www.wxpython.org/) 
> for some time now on win2k and LINUX and its pretty good.

Heh.  I've found it to be otherwise.  I've had it segfaulting Python several
times, and also encountered wierd and completely unusable behaviour that
only occured on Win32 and not on GTK.  After many hours of searching the
docs and then grovelling through the mailing-list archives, I found a
mention of "Oh, and if you do blah on Win32 from a blahblah, you'll need to
call foo here".  Pity the API docs don't mention it.  It also _has_ to be
run from the main thread of Python, which is not clearly documented anywhere
and causes wierd bugs until you figure it out, not to mention being a pain
in the bum.  That and I thought it was pretty messy to program for (though
most GUI toolkits are), it just felt "unPythonic" to me.

> There is a lot of resources and the documentation is
> quite complete (same docs as the C++ version) and augmented
> by the mailing lists it is excellent.

My experience here is very different!

The documentation for wxPython is virtually non-existent.  Saying "here's
the list of classes we've got Python bindings for, and here's the C++ docs
for them" is not good enough.  You're continually guessing how the bindings
relate to the underlying C++, there's all sorts of large gaps that make
things very frustrating.  I'm sorry I can't be more specific here; it's been
6 months and I have no wish to dig through those docs again just to find an
example.

The demo app looks good, but is not as good as it seems.  Some of the demo
code mysteriously fails when run standalone, but works perfectly inside the
demo app!  Why?  I spent several hours on this and never figured it out.
Whole widgets utterly failed to work for me at all.  Luckily I found
equivalent functionality in another widget, and it, mysteriously, did work.
Why there were two different ways of implementing a splitter I don't know,
other than the obvious reason that one simply didn't seem to work...

I found wxPython to be extremely frustrating to develop for.  I'm not doing
anything GUI-related at the moment, but if something is trivial enough, I'd
recommend Tkinter because it is well-documented and it works as advertised.
It lacks many useful features (like a good list control/widget/thingy), so
if I need to do something larger, at the moment I think I would look at
pyGTK, but I've heard mixed reports on it as well.  The idea of using glade
to build an interface is attractive, though.

-Andrew.

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