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This article only talks about one aspect of the larger problem in UI Development - the webification of everything. It's good that we've finally been able to ag

This article only talks about one aspect of the larger problem in UI Development - the webification of everything. It's good that we've finally been able to agree on a common set of tools to make UIs, it's just too bad it had to be this one. The HTML/JS/CSS/DOM mess is a pretty terrible solution that we seem to be stuck with. History is peppered with UI authoring tools that were better but stewarded by companies that held to tight licensing that stunted their growth. Hypercard, delphi, adobe flash (and FLEX - which looks a lot like react), even unity has more intuitive wysiwyg UI tools that could have proved versatile with the right stewardship. The difference is vertical integration. These companies made their tools complete solutions and often went so far as to put virtual machines on everything to interpret them correctly every time. The article's author touches on the license problem with python's own pretty damn good QT lib. If only someone could find a way to make a good tool without fucking up licensing.

toyg 10y ago
The licensing issue with PyQt is very simple: it's the main source of revenue for Riverbank, a small UK company founded by PyQt's author, Phil Thompson. He can't give it away for free because it's literally his livelihood. He does a great job of evolving and updating the wrappers -- just ask how "easy" that is to the PySide authors, which are supposed to do the same job and have been struggling (technically and financially) ever since their project lost "free money" when Nokia died. The licensing for Qt itself is very simple: if you redistribute and don't go GPL, you have to pay. It's one of the fairest arrangements out there. PyQt has similar terms.
- throwaway13337 10y ago
  I'm not implying these vendors should work for free. Just that they could have been more creative with the way they monetized. The way that makes most sense to me is charging for the authoring tools and making the language/VM completely open (e.g. MIT license). Maybe that's too idealistic?
  - infinite8s 10y ago
    Have you tried making a living that way?
  - kgwgk 10y ago
    > I'm not implying these vendors should work for free. You're implying that they should charge others for the parts that you don't care about? If only they had been a bit more creative...
    - throwaway13337 10y ago
      Not at all. I used adobe's toolset for flash. Even if flash was open source completely, I'm sure the authoring tool would have been still nearly required. Keeping the underlying language open simply means that it would have been more usable and extensible.
      - kgwgk 10y ago
        Ok. I don't know anything about PyQt so if you tell me that the dual license arrangement prevents you from using and extending it, despite your willingness to pay, I'll take your word for it.
- iamcreasy 10y ago
  I think you can use Qt free license in your commercial product(distribute it or not) as long as you dynamically link Qt libraries.
  - toyg 10y ago
    The situation for Qt has changed several times in the last few years through the various acquisitions, so yeah, I might be a bit out of date because it doesn't really matter for PyQt itself -- that's just GPL or commercial.
  - mherrmann 10y ago
    Exactly. The LGPL (which Qt is licensed under) permits this. It also permits subclassing. What toyg wrote would be true if Qt were licensed under the GPL.
    - dagw 10y ago
      Qt is under the LGPL, but PyQt isn't. So if you want to develop Qt applications with python and PyQt you have to abide by the GPL, not just the LGPL, or buy a commercial license.
      - infinite8s 10y ago
        You can use the LGPL version of Qt and the commercial version of PyQT (which is much cheaper than the commercial version of Qt)
      - dbcurtis 10y ago
        pyside recently came back under the Qt umbrella, so it should be viable option again.
- sevensor 10y ago
  And, PyQt works great! I've been playing around with the QOpenGLWidget lately, which not only integrates beautifully with the rest of Qt, but also makes it really easy to write and use a shader program. It's a shame, although not at all surprising, that the few decent online tutorials for modern OpenGL go the C++ / GLEW route. The barrier to entry with PyQt is so much lower!
gaius 10y ago
We solved this in the 90s with Motif. Then the world collectively went insane and chose AWT. History repeating as tragedy and farce.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Win32 was a pleasure to use compared with my failed attempts to use Motif, back in the day.
  - Luyt 10y ago
    Especially when wrapped with Borland's VCL (in contrast to MFC).
    - Elrac 10y ago
      I was once asked to leave my comfort zone and write a Windows GUI app. Delphi saved me from the horrors of Petzold, the MFC and VB. Can confirm: it was a pleasure to layout and code in.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      OWL was already quite good. It was quite sad that Borland mismanagement eventually pushed most of us into MFC world.
- dagw 10y ago
  I don't know, I distinctly recall Motif being Not Very Fun to use.
  - gaius 10y ago
    Was it perfect? No. Was it better than learning a new toolkit for every major project? A thousand times yes.
    - infinite8s 10y ago
      Did Motif work on Windows?
coredog64 10y ago
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "HTML is the worst UI framework, except for all the others".
- protomyth 10y ago
  Sun NeWS or Display Postscript would have been better, but Adobe and Sun didn't push it.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Except for all the other ones like Tk, Rebol, CLIM, now Qt/QML.... Seriously, if anyone thinks HTML/CSS is easy to write UIs with, try Tcl/Tk or Rebol.
  - douche 10y ago
    Shit, WinForms is easier to write UIs for than the HTML/CSS/JS abomination.
themartorana 10y ago
I'm not totally sold on having landed on a bad toolset. Recently I've been looking at email and tools like it - messy, sometimes ugly tools that have withstood the test of time. People try to "fix" and "disrupt" it all the time, but it's pretty good as it is, and its resiliency is a testament to that. I don't have a fully-formed hypothesis, and I like native apps better than WebKit/electron based apps just like the next guy, but there has to be something to it, no?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  The defining characteristic of e-mail and "tools like it" is that they come from pre-Web era, and don't touch the modern web with a ten foot pole (the HTML was grafted on-top of perfectly good e-mail protocol, but is in no way a part of it).
ThomPete 10y ago
I actually believe that the HTML/JS/CCS/DOM mess is a good thing and that it's a pretty powerful combination that rivals other more powerful languages in 90% of the cases for the kind of applications one might want to build. HTML is actually one of the most powerful layout engines out there, Javascript is as versatile and powerful a language as you might want to ask for in 90% of the cases, CSS has it's flaws but they are being addressed and is fine for most styling issues and DOM is just a very easy to understand albeit crude way to handle objects. All in all a combination of tools that makes it extremely easy to get started and se results right away. I believe this is also on of the reasons why PHP is so popular. It's ability to seamlessly integrate with that "mess" either to take over the formatting or to fit into the existing formatting. It's a conceptual framework thats closest to what we as humans understand. Pythons problem like most other programming languages including Objective-C and Ruby is that while they are elegant and powerful computationally they are horrible for most people to get started with because just setting it up in itself is a big task. So I don't think we are stuck. In fact I believe that if Python would take the same laize faire approach to the mess as PHP it would be much more popular than it is today.
- gaius 10y ago
  You know, if MS had written Outlook in VBA and told people to read their email as a plugin to Word, they would have been laughed out of the room. But that's exactly what Google did with GMail and now everyone builds apps that way! Browsers are for documents, and forcing applications to be interactive documents is, when you look at it like that, ludicrous.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    Browser are for whatever browsers can be made to be for. There are things it's optimal for but luckily we don't live in a world were people only do what things were originally meant for. I am using gmail in the browser. I am discussing this with you. I am transferring money between accounts, playing games, filling out surveys, controlling projects, looking up routes on map, enjoying streaming music, video etc. It's all good.
zeveb 10y ago
> The article's author touches on the license problem with python's own pretty damn good QT lib. > If only someone could find a way to make a good tool without fucking up licensing. The rest of your comment is quite intelligent, but I find these lines to be quite the opposite. PyQt is available under both the GPL & a commercial license (https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt/PyQtLicensing https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt/PyQtLicensing). What you & the article author seem to want is for other people to write software that you can use and modify for free while you charge your own users to use and modify the software you write. That's, in a word, hypocrisy. If you want to distribute a commercial PyQt app, then buy a license; otherwise release under the GPL (or a compatible license).
bobwaycott 10y ago
The licensing problem is real, however. I've thought for a while about building a lib for this sort of thing. Funding the time necessary is the hard part. Requiring paid licensing for commercial usage seems fair. Using my awesome project for free fun? Cool. Using it to build something that makes you some money? I'd really appreciate you helping support the continued development and support of the thing helping you make money.

toyg 10y ago

The licensing issue with PyQt is very simple: it's the main source of revenue for Riverbank, a small UK company founded by PyQt's author, Phil Thompson. He can't give it away for free because it's literally his livelihood. He does a great job of evolving and updating the wrappers -- just ask how "easy" that is to the PySide authors, which are supposed to do the same job and have been struggling (technically and financially) ever since their project lost "free money" when Nokia died. The licensing for Qt itself is very simple: if you redistribute and don't go GPL, you have to pay. It's one of the fairest arrangements out there. PyQt has similar terms.

throwaway13337 10y ago
I'm not implying these vendors should work for free. Just that they could have been more creative with the way they monetized. The way that makes most sense to me is charging for the authoring tools and making the language/VM completely open (e.g. MIT license). Maybe that's too idealistic?
- infinite8s 10y ago
  Have you tried making a living that way?
- kgwgk 10y ago
  > I'm not implying these vendors should work for free. You're implying that they should charge others for the parts that you don't care about? If only they had been a bit more creative...
  - throwaway13337 10y ago
    Not at all. I used adobe's toolset for flash. Even if flash was open source completely, I'm sure the authoring tool would have been still nearly required. Keeping the underlying language open simply means that it would have been more usable and extensible.
    - kgwgk 10y ago
      Ok. I don't know anything about PyQt so if you tell me that the dual license arrangement prevents you from using and extending it, despite your willingness to pay, I'll take your word for it.
iamcreasy 10y ago
I think you can use Qt free license in your commercial product(distribute it or not) as long as you dynamically link Qt libraries.
- toyg 10y ago
  The situation for Qt has changed several times in the last few years through the various acquisitions, so yeah, I might be a bit out of date because it doesn't really matter for PyQt itself -- that's just GPL or commercial.
- mherrmann 10y ago
  Exactly. The LGPL (which Qt is licensed under) permits this. It also permits subclassing. What toyg wrote would be true if Qt were licensed under the GPL.
  - dagw 10y ago
    Qt is under the LGPL, but PyQt isn't. So if you want to develop Qt applications with python and PyQt you have to abide by the GPL, not just the LGPL, or buy a commercial license.
    - infinite8s 10y ago
      You can use the LGPL version of Qt and the commercial version of PyQT (which is much cheaper than the commercial version of Qt)
    - dbcurtis 10y ago
      pyside recently came back under the Qt umbrella, so it should be viable option again.
sevensor 10y ago
And, PyQt works great! I've been playing around with the QOpenGLWidget lately, which not only integrates beautifully with the rest of Qt, but also makes it really easy to write and use a shader program. It's a shame, although not at all surprising, that the few decent online tutorials for modern OpenGL go the C++ / GLEW route. The barrier to entry with PyQt is so much lower!

gaius 10y ago

We solved this in the 90s with Motif. Then the world collectively went insane and chose AWT. History repeating as tragedy and farce.

pjmlp 10y ago
Win32 was a pleasure to use compared with my failed attempts to use Motif, back in the day.
- Luyt 10y ago
  Especially when wrapped with Borland's VCL (in contrast to MFC).
  - Elrac 10y ago
    I was once asked to leave my comfort zone and write a Windows GUI app. Delphi saved me from the horrors of Petzold, the MFC and VB. Can confirm: it was a pleasure to layout and code in.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    OWL was already quite good. It was quite sad that Borland mismanagement eventually pushed most of us into MFC world.
dagw 10y ago
I don't know, I distinctly recall Motif being Not Very Fun to use.
- gaius 10y ago
  Was it perfect? No. Was it better than learning a new toolkit for every major project? A thousand times yes.
  - infinite8s 10y ago
    Did Motif work on Windows?

coredog64 10y ago

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "HTML is the worst UI framework, except for all the others".

protomyth 10y ago
Sun NeWS or Display Postscript would have been better, but Adobe and Sun didn't push it.
PeCaN 10y ago
Except for all the other ones like Tk, Rebol, CLIM, now Qt/QML.... Seriously, if anyone thinks HTML/CSS is easy to write UIs with, try Tcl/Tk or Rebol.
- douche 10y ago
  Shit, WinForms is easier to write UIs for than the HTML/CSS/JS abomination.

themartorana 10y ago

I'm not totally sold on having landed on a bad toolset. Recently I've been looking at email and tools like it - messy, sometimes ugly tools that have withstood the test of time. People try to "fix" and "disrupt" it all the time, but it's pretty good as it is, and its resiliency is a testament to that. I don't have a fully-formed hypothesis, and I like native apps better than WebKit/electron based apps just like the next guy, but there has to be something to it, no?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
The defining characteristic of e-mail and "tools like it" is that they come from pre-Web era, and don't touch the modern web with a ten foot pole (the HTML was grafted on-top of perfectly good e-mail protocol, but is in no way a part of it).

ThomPete 10y ago

I actually believe that the HTML/JS/CCS/DOM mess is a good thing and that it's a pretty powerful combination that rivals other more powerful languages in 90% of the cases for the kind of applications one might want to build. HTML is actually one of the most powerful layout engines out there, Javascript is as versatile and powerful a language as you might want to ask for in 90% of the cases, CSS has it's flaws but they are being addressed and is fine for most styling issues and DOM is just a very easy to understand albeit crude way to handle objects. All in all a combination of tools that makes it extremely easy to get started and se results right away. I believe this is also on of the reasons why PHP is so popular. It's ability to seamlessly integrate with that "mess" either to take over the formatting or to fit into the existing formatting. It's a conceptual framework thats closest to what we as humans understand. Pythons problem like most other programming languages including Objective-C and Ruby is that while they are elegant and powerful computationally they are horrible for most people to get started with because just setting it up in itself is a big task. So I don't think we are stuck. In fact I believe that if Python would take the same laize faire approach to the mess as PHP it would be much more popular than it is today.

gaius 10y ago
You know, if MS had written Outlook in VBA and told people to read their email as a plugin to Word, they would have been laughed out of the room. But that's exactly what Google did with GMail and now everyone builds apps that way! Browsers are for documents, and forcing applications to be interactive documents is, when you look at it like that, ludicrous.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Browser are for whatever browsers can be made to be for. There are things it's optimal for but luckily we don't live in a world were people only do what things were originally meant for. I am using gmail in the browser. I am discussing this with you. I am transferring money between accounts, playing games, filling out surveys, controlling projects, looking up routes on map, enjoying streaming music, video etc. It's all good.

zeveb 10y ago

> The article's author touches on the license problem with python's own pretty damn good QT lib. > If only someone could find a way to make a good tool without fucking up licensing. The rest of your comment is quite intelligent, but I find these lines to be quite the opposite. PyQt is available under both the GPL & a commercial license (https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt/PyQtLicensing https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt/PyQtLicensing). What you & the article author seem to want is for other people to write software that you can use and modify for free while you charge your own users to use and modify the software you write. That's, in a word, hypocrisy. If you want to distribute a commercial PyQt app, then buy a license; otherwise release under the GPL (or a compatible license).

bobwaycott 10y ago

The licensing problem is real, however. I've thought for a while about building a lib for this sort of thing. Funding the time necessary is the hard part. Requiring paid licensing for commercial usage seems fair. Using my awesome project for free fun? Cool. Using it to build something that makes you some money? I'd really appreciate you helping support the continued development and support of the thing helping you make money.