[Zope] Vote for Windowing Toolkit to use for Fat Client

sean.upton@uniontrib.com sean.upton@uniontrib.com
Tue, 22 May 2001 09:02:38 -0700


Yuck.  Sorry, but for x-platform development, if the Trolls are going to
charge for Windows dev. license, it makes no sense to use this as a basis
for an x-platform open-source project; this is not just KDE, it has to run
on other platforms and still have a free core!!!  This would have to run on
Win32, and by using a commercial toolkit like Qt, you significantly raise
the barrier to entry for potential developers.

wxPython is (from the looks of it) going to be the defacto replacement for
tkinter, and it is relatively friendly - and I believe wider used - and
there is not reason to complain about using gtk widgets on *NIX, because the
development is abstracted by a class library (and gtk widgets are much more
aesthetically pleasing!).

There is a practical (not dogmatic) reason to keep things free: you want to
encourage widespread development and contribution, and you won't get that
with a limit imposed by a commercial toolkit.  What I don't understand is
what differentiates most of the frameworks for desktop development
(wxWindows, Qt, MFC, OWL, inti, etc), they all try to share the same idea
space - but wxWindows at least qualifies as mature, modern, and free.

Sean


-----Original Message-----
From: ender [mailto:kthangavelu@earthlink.net]
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 1:11 AM
To: Chris Withers; zope@zope.org
Cc: andyd@nipltd.com
Subject: Re: [Zope] Vote for Windowing Toolkit to use for Fat Client


On Tuesday 22 May 2001 01:38, Chris Withers wrote:
>>Hi,
>>
>>A couple of us here at NIP are playing around with building a fat client
>> for Zope, based on Python and hopefully using a ZEO connection to do most
>> of the interaction.
>>
>>We're looking at both wxPython and Tkinter as possible windowing toolkits.
>>
>>Which one would you choose?
>>Why? ;-)

pyQT, 

very mature cross platform high performance, graphically rich toolkit, 
support for internationalization, new support for macs, runs on embedded 
devices (zope admin for the palm:), lots of features. ibm's investing for 
voice recoginition. qtdesigner is very nice gui design environment with xml 
xports that will allow code generation for all supported platforms. qt3.0
has 
some nice db/io abstractions in the toolkit. the windows version is not free

but if you're willing to plop down some change for a dev. license you can 
release a windows version. the x win stuff is gpl'd

http://www.trolltech.com (qt trolls)

http://www.thekompany.com  (its under their projects section for pyqt).

btw. you should maybe have a look at wingide.com and check out their patches

to interface to zope.

cheers

kapil

_______________________________________________
Zope maillist  -  Zope@zope.org
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope
**   No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )