wxPython, a GUI Toolkit

To many people in the “real world”, MS Windows is an inescapable, however unfortunate, fact of life. Some of these people might even have clients or bosses who require a “standard” Windows GUI application at the end of the day. For many developers, being able to choose the best tool for the task at hand, rather than being told which one to use, is an essential element of their quality of life, and Linux is a pleasant development environment.

It is in fact now possible to do quality, rapid GUI development for Windows on Linux, and is becoming increasingly possible for other GUI systems as well, such as Apple Macintosh, BeOS or OS/2. One of these tools, which I present in this article, is wxPython, which is not only based upon a proven toolkit, wxWindows, but uses our favorite language, Python.

There is no lack of choice of GUI development systems or toolkits under Linux, and quite a few of them can be called portable, i.e., work on at least two different platforms, for example, Linux/UNIX+X11 and Windows. Many of them are free, but not all of them are in usable form (i.e., documented, maintained, relatively bug-free and feature-rich). However, we are fortunate that such tools do exist. In fact, a well-maintained web page, http://www.free-soft.org/guitool/, lists an impressive number of such toolkits. The problem is deciding which one to choose, since life is too short to try them all.

Life is a series of compromises. Often, the problem is finding out which set of drawbacks one is prepared to live with in return for which benefits. For one of my projects, I finally settled on the following list:

At the time of this writing, wxPython is in release 2.1.13. Its author, Robin Dunn, has done a very good job of wrapping up wxWindows, one of the classic C++ GUI tool kits that has been around for several years. As a result of its relatively long existence and popularity, wxWindows has been ported to a number of toolkits and platforms and enjoys a relatively large widget collection. For Linux, the version of wxWindows that wxPython uses is wxGTK, the wxWindows interface to the GTK. For windows, the wxWindows port to win32 was used.

The interface of wxWindows to Python is remarkably transparent. The concepts are the same and the naming conventions are mostly the same. The object-oriented nature of the toolkit has been preserved. If you know how to program in C++ with wxWindows, you will have no problem with wxPython. Conversely, if you have a working proof of concept in wxPython, porting all or part of it to C++ for better speed should be straightforward.

wxPython is quite compact, but doesn't come with the standard Python distribution. See the Resources section on where to get the software. I found wxPython easy to learn; the distribution comes with a huge series of helpful demos which I will use in examples.

All of wxPython is open source, so people can contribute and fix bugs. In general, the software quality is high.

For all its qualities, wxPython does have a few minor drawbacks. As of this writing, the wrapping of wxWindows is not complete, but Robin Dunn and others are working on finishing up.

The documentation is both very complete and almost non-existent. Robin can get away with this because wxPython is so similar to wxWindows that the wxWindows documentation, which is quite good and complete, can be used instead. The Python-specific part of the documentation is reduced to a small number of notes within the text (if a feature is not available or slightly different, for example) and a small section toward the end of the documentation. It is hardly any effort to do the mental translation from C++-type calls to Python, but if you've never seen C++ code in your life, this can be seriously off-putting.

The product is still very much in development. It follows wxGTK quite closely, but the wxGTK version it is based on is an unstable, development version. This means a number of things may not work perfectly, and things are likely to change a lot from version to version. I've had a lot of problems with printing under Linux, whereas it works perfectly under Windows.

wxPython would probably benefit greatly from a step-by-step tutorial. By the time you read this, someone will most likely have written one.

An interactive GUI-building tool would also be of interest. I understand that reusing the one from wxWindows should become possible soon.