I just finished off a small project in wxPython and I must say I am pretty impressed with the library. A couple of weeks back I had to do a small assignment (, not relating to the game or the engine I am currently working on) which required a fairly amount of GUI. The specification of the project demanded that the software be able to run on Linux, Win32 and Solaris. Solaris support however, was later dropped due to time constraints. It was a pretty small project (, considering of course I am working on the engine and the game for well over 2 years now). About a sum total of 5 days of work in the end. I was a bit hesitant to take on the work initially but changed my mind once it was decided that Python and wxPython was OK.
I’ve been meaning to take wxPython for a ride for a while now and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. If you have read my Selecting a scripting language articles (1 & 2) you will know I have a secondary interest in working on Python. I am looking to integrate Python into the engine. This just gave me an opportunity to have a look at the wxPython code and bindings in detail. That actually is a totally different topic in itself and I will go in to further details in the third part of the series (whenever I get around to writing it, probably soon). Coming back to wxPython, it’s been about 2 years since I worked on wxPython and I liked it then and I like it now.
Today wxPython is probably the best python GUI according to me. I haven’t worked with PyQt but I had tried messing around with PyGTK. PyGTK to be fair is kinda OK, but is less supported than wxPython. Also the fact that wxPython is far more extensive in widget and framework support than PyGTK, makes the former a more attractive choice. PyQt was just out of the contention for me because of 2 things, a) It has a very shady license, I think it is not LGPL compatible. You can’t trust it enough to use it in commercial product without breaking some license somewhere, too controversial! AND b) Qt is just such a horrible framework! I know people are going to disagree with me on this one, but Qt’s moc compiler thing just makes me cringe. I have worked on a large project involving Qt and C++, and those moc_* files can be a nightmare at compile times. Besides Qt uses archaic and redundant C++ practices to maintain compiler compatibility. So I generally tend to “run away” from Qt and Qt projects.
