[BioPython] Tkinter

[Andrew Dalke]

Cayte said:
>   We could use Tkinter to create a GUI for biopython.  Is this
> worth exploring?

Short version:  Yes, and see
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D1884777813/pythonsoftwareacA/002-7039543-2383467
for a soon-to-arrive book on the topic.

Longer:

  We use both Tk and Gtk for our GUI projects.  Tk doesn't have
a good hierachical tree viewer that can deal with our several
thousand item tree, while we have problems getting Gtk canvases
working on our SGIs because of n32/o32 issues (if you don't know
about the difference and don't work on SGIs, be glad! :)

  As it turns out, Tk and Gtk don't work well together, because
they both want the main event loop.  As a hack, one of the guys
here prototyped an GUI using three programs on two different machines
and with the two toolkits, communicating via ILU (a CORBA-like
communications method).  And it all worked!

  I want to look at Gtk some more because of the possibilities
of integrating with the GNOME packages, like the Gnumeric
spreadsheet.  However, Gtk is only seriously on X for the moment,
while Tkinter is cross platform.

  Another possibility we are considering is developing our
GUI tools in JPython, which leverages off Java's cross-platform
work.  But then we'll have to figure out how to get our shared
libraries working -- they were designed for the C<->Python interface
and not JNI.  Hmm, ILU/CORBA?  :)

						Andrew