[wuug-list] [wuug-forum] ezod: Python (and wx) IDE

[Xavier Spriet]

Aaron,

I do quite a bit of python dev and PyDev is a very good editor. I also
seriously recommend trying Wingware IDE, there's a free version and it's
one of the best python dev environments you'll find. Komodo has a free
edition also, but I'm not a big fan personally.

None of those have the GUI builder built-in though, but you should use
wxGlade for this anyway and then use the wx python bindings to parse
the wxGlade XML files. Overall, I'd recommend steering clear of
wxWidgets though unless the code you write absolutely has to be
cross-platform
and won't be GPL. I've used wxPython quite a bit but it has a horrible
record of completely breaking backward compatibility when major new
versions
are released and your app is then completely broken on every distro.
Furthermore, it's pretty slow compared to native toolkits and even other
cross-platform toolkits like QT, and since it tries to abstract on top
of everything, it relies on the lowest common denominator for every
component,
so your built-in dialogs are very basic and you don't have access to a
lot of the higher-end features of modern toolkits. Its advantage though,
is that it
is super cross-platform.

If your target OS is mainly Unix/Linux, my personal favourite is GTK.
You can build your UI in Glade and there are excellent python bindings
for libglade
that will construct your GUI from the Glade XML file and it is very
fast. It has known threading issues on windows, so if you need windows
support, be
very careful. QT isn't quite as nice on Linux because it lacks support
for Gnome themeing on those desktops, but it is 100% cross-platform with
some really
nice Aqua bindings for OSX and native MFC (and possibly even
windows.forms through Qt#) on Windows, however it is very expensive if
your app is commercial,
as it's only free if your project is pure GPL or LGPL.

Python also has a fully cross-platform and pretty fast UI toolkit
built-in called Tkinter based on Tk, but it lacks native themeing on
every OS and has very basic
controls and no graphical UI builder, so it's a pretty poor toolkit
overall.

If your target platform is only windows, IronPython is extremely fast
and has native windows.forms support, however, since it's built on top
of the .NET runtime,
your shipped product will require this runtime to be installed. There
are also a couple of toolkits available that are win32 specific. I have
them bookmarked
on delicious so I can find them in there if you're interested.

Overall, in terms of python/GUI, GTK is as good as it gets... it's a
fast toolkit that has good themeing support on Gnome/KDE (with the
GTK-QT themeing engine) and
a very good UI builder (Glade and Glade3 and also Gazpacho), and a great
community... check out www.pygtk.org


Xavier

On Thu, 2007-17-05 at 21:41 -0400, Windsor UNIX Users Group wrote:

> Author: ezod
> Username: ezod (dyn216-8-135-6.ADSL.mnsi.net)
> Subject: Python (and wx) IDE
> Forum: Coding
> Link: http://www.wuug.org/read.php?14,23,23#msg-23
> Approved: Yes
> 
> Is there a good free software Python IDE for UNIX/Linux that does wx GUI building? I hear PyDev isn't bad, but I've never used Eclipse before... Is ActiveGrid any good? Will I be happier just doing GUI building with wxGlade? And lastly, I'm not at all afraid of coding it all myself -- I write Win32 API C++ apps from scratch and rarely use IDEs in general -- is this the tidiest way to do it if I'm comfortable with it, or am I just wasting time?
> 
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