browsergui

What is this?

It's a GUI framework prioritizing portability, simplicity, and a Pythonic feel.

If you want to build a simple GUI for a simple task, I recommend this package whole-heartedly. I don't think this is just pride in my own work -- I'm pretty sure that this package actually is very easy to learn, and very good for simple things.

If you want to build a video game, or a nice, fluid 3D visualization, this is easily the worst GUI framework I have ever seen.

• Why is it good?
• Why is it bad?
• What are the alternatives?
• How do I install it?
• How do I learn to use it?

Why is it good?

This package prioritizes ease of use, portability, and good documentation above all else. The following statements will remain true as long as I have breath left in my body:

• It feels like Python. It uses HTML/CSS/JS under the hood, but that fact is carefully hidden under nice object-oriented abstractions. Contrast with Tkinter, which feels like Tk, because it is.
• It has a shallow learning curve. "Hello World" is GUI(Text("Hello world!")).run(). Minesweeper, including the game logic, is less than 100 lines of code and looks like this.
• It's super-portable. pip install browsergui && python -m browsergui.examples has worked, with no snags, on every system I've tried (OS X, Debian, and Ubuntu, with both Python 2.7 and a few Python 3.Xs). Seriously, you could run that right now and it would work, without a single abstruse error messages about your Qt/wx/PyObjC installation. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I've never seen another GUI library so easy to install.
• It's well-documented. There's a wiki to teach you how to use it. There are examples. There's a reference manual. There's a runnable demo for every predefined kind of element. I've spent more time documenting than I've spent writing actual code.

Why is it bad?

• It's slow. It does not even try to be high-performance. There's an HTTP request every time the user interacts with the GUI, and again every time the view is updated. Performance is off the table. (It's not frustratingly slow -- you can drag a slider and see the value update with no perceptible delay -- but it's not good for fancy stuff.)
• It's not super-easy to make super-pretty things. I just haven't prioritized styling: any styling you want to do, you have to do through CSS. I'm not sure element.css['color'] = 'red' is so much worse than widget.config(foreground="#f00"), but it does feel like a thin wrapper over CSS (because it is), which is gross.

How do I install it?

If you use pip, pip install browsergui.

If you use easy_install, easy_install browsergui.

If you don't like package managers, just unzip this and put the browsergui folder anywhere on your Python path.

Once it's installed, I recommend running python -m browsergui.examples to see a catalog of all the kinds of building blocks available to you, or checking out the wiki for tutorial-type stuff.

How do I learn to use it?

The wiki has several tutorial-type pages. Or you could just extrapolate from these examples:

• Hello world:

    from browsergui import GUI, Text
    GUI(Text("Hello world!")).run()
  

• A number that increments every time you press a button:

    from browsergui import GUI, Text, Button
  
    button = Button('0')
    @button.def_callback
    def increment():
      button.text = str(int(button.text)+1)
  
    GUI(button).run()
  

• A clock:

    import time
    import threading
    from browsergui import Text, GUI
  
    now = Text("")
  
    def update_now_forever():
      while True:
        now.text = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
        time.sleep(1)
  
    t = threading.Thread(target=update_now_forever)
    t.daemon = True
    t.start()
  
    GUI(Text("The time is: "), now).run()
  

(You can close/reopen the browser window at any time; Ctrl-C will stop the server.)

Each kind of element (Text, Button, ColorField, Grid...) also has a simple example showing you how to use it: python -m browsergui.examples will display all those examples to you.

What are the alternatives?

I am aware of some GUI toolkits for Python that fill a similar niche. You should consider using these instead:

• tkinter (standard library)

  Advantages: it's in the standard library. It has always worked out of the box for me. If you want maximal portability, this is probably your best bet.

  Disadvantages: it feels like a wrapper around Tk, because it is. This gives good performance and detailed control, but writing it feels unintuitive (to me).

• pyJS, another Python package for making GUIs targeting browsers. It works by compiling your Python code into a slug of JavaScript which runs in the browser.

  Advantages: pyJS applications are much faster and much easier to deploy (since it doesn't require the user to run Python).

  Disadvantages: I had trouble installing it. And like tkinter, it's a wrapper, with the same dis/advantages.

There are, of course, many other GUI toolkits. Here is a list of those popular enough to earn the notice of Official Python People. Here is a paralytically long listing of less-notable ones.