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

[Aaron Mavrinac]

Awesome, thanks Xav!

This is going to be a Linux-only app, under tightly controlled
conditions (in fact, I think we're going to run the app as an X shell,
sans WM/DE), so cross-platform compatibility and themeing are not an
issue. Ironically, it was your advice some time back that got me
interested in wx, and I was looking at it primarily for rapid GUI
building, but I'm not married to it and I was considering GTK also. If
that's the way to go in your opinion, then that's the way we'll go,
and I'll see what I like for GUI building. For coding, I'll check out
PyDev and Wingware, but most likely I'm just going to end up using
vim, as usual...

Thanks again.

On 5/18/07, Xavier Spriet <xavier at wuug.org> wrote:
>
>  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?
>
>
>


-- 
Aaron Mavrinac
www.mavrinac.com

PGP Public Key: http://www.mavrinac.com/pgp.asc