GUI Programming with Python—The Road Ahead

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The Future of GUI Programming with Python

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Me • Call me TP • Follow @uranusjr • https://uranusjr.com

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http://macdown.uranusjr.com

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www. .com

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Terminology • User interacts with a program through a user interface (UI) • A UI based on images is a graphical user interface (GUI)

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I want a GUI library that works. works

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What I Want • Native UI and UX • Portability • Ease to deploy • Pythonic API

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What We Have

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Tkinter • “Python’s de-facto standard GUI” • Native nowhere • Themed Tk • Binding to Tcl/Tk • Lean, but may be lacking

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Platform-speciﬁc • PyObjC on OS X (Cocoa) • Win32API on Windows • PyGObject on Gnome (GTK+) • Native UI/UX • Needs to deploy C binding • Very weird API

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Special Interpreters • .NET via IronPython (Windows) • AWT/Swing via Jython • Weird API • Compatibility with other libraries

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Binding to Third-party • PyQt and PySide to Qt • wxPython to wxWidgets • Works quite natively • Cross-platform application code • Weird API • Needs to deploy tons of things

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“Let’s Build Everything” • Kivy and Pyglet • Cross-platform application code • Nice Pythonic API • Needs to deploy C binding • Not native (and they don’t care)

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Solution UI/UX Portable API Deploy Tkinter Meh Platform-speciﬁc Meh Jython Meh Meh Third-party Bindings Kivy / Pyglet Meh

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Licensing • GPL and LGPL • Source distribution • Static linking

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So?

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What I Want • Native UI and UX • Portability • Ease to deploy • Pythonic API

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The Solution (IMO) • Dynamic binding to native GUI • CPython compatibility • No non-Python dependencies • Wrapper API on top

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Native API Python API Wrapper Binding (in Python)

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The Binding • Foreign function interface • libfﬁ • ctypes • CFFI, anyone?

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Native API Python API Wrapper ctypes

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Native API Python API Wrapper GTK+ ctypes PyGObject

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Native API Python API Wrapper ctypes

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Native API C API (e.g. CoreFoundation) Python API Wrapper ctypes Objective-C API ctypes + wrapper

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IUUQQZCFFPSHUPHB

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How?

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toga toga-win32 toga-cocoa toga-gtk … rubicon PyGObject ctypes Native GUI Library

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toga toga-win32 toga-cocoa toga-gtk … rubicon PyGObject ctypes Native GUI Library

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……

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Difﬁculties • API design • Platform knowledge • UI Layout

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https://github.com/pybee/toga

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WHAT IF I AM INTERESTED IN SOMETHING ELSE?

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Did I hear mobile?

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lwn.net/Articles/640625/ You might also want to read this.

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Mobile Support • API availability • The Store • “Paradigm mismatch”

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Python Issue #23670 Modiﬁcations to support iOS as a cross-compilation target

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Recap • What we have is not good enough • Proposed solution • Python on mobile OSs

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WHAT IF I AM INTERESTED IN SOMETHING ELSE?