Initial thoughts on Python GUI frameworks

Kevin Day, October 7th, 2007

In the last few weeks I’ve tried two different Python frameworks for writing GUI applications: wxPython and PyGTK. Here’s my initial thoughts on each.

wxPython

wxPython comes with an awesome set of examples, and it seems to be the favorite Python framework among programmers. Copying and pasting from the examples was easy, and I had my own simple applications working in no time.

I also played around with Boa Constructor, which is a GUI that will produce wxPython code for widgets as they are added and edited. Unfortunately, the Linux version seems to have a few bugs. The most frustrating part was when I ran into a bug just by following the tutorial.

PyGTK

Later I switched to PyGTK because I found that it’s supported by Nokia’s series of internet tablets. PyGTK has a 400-page tutorial with several examples that I’ve been working through. Once I got familiar with the different widgets it wasn’t too hard putting together my own applications, although I’m still running into a few problems here and there. I’ve read that Glade is nice program for building GTK interfaces, so I’ll probably try that out soon.

Conclusion

Both wxPython and PyGTK seem like great ways to build Python GUIs. It’ll take a few more weeks of hacking to really get a feel for them though. For the moment I’m sticking with PyGTK because of the potential for using it with Nokia tablets (the N800 is on sale now for $243 at buy.com…hmm…) . When I get enough time I’ll post a short tutorial for a PyGTK application based on my recent experiences.

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