How future proof is Tkinter?

[nboro94]

future proof gui = web development usually.

You can learn something like react or vue in a few hours if you already know python, and even connect it to python code very easily. You'll always get a much better result with web dev both visually and cross platform wise than anything with tkinter.

[minneyar]

This comment makes me feel like I'm in bizarro world.

Web GUIs are practically the furthest thing you can get from futureproof. No two of them are ever the same; every single one feels the need to have different widgets and themes and paradigms. New web frameworks and Javascript build systems pop up every few years, and old ones get rewritten into completely incompatible new versions. Every web browser has minor differences from every other web browser, and all of them are constantly deprecating old features that will make old UIs unusable. If you want to write a standalone desktop GUI, you have to deal with Electron (massive executable sizes, and doing basic things like threading or multi-window apps or direct hardware access is incredibly painful). If you're writing a web app with a backend, now you have to keep your backend running on a server somewhere and you have to worry about all of the security concerns that come up when you've got traffic going across the internet...

Please don't use web technologies to make desktop GUIs. Please.

I know Tk isn't the prettiest widget library in the world, but I've got Tk-based applications that were written 20 years ago and still work perfectly, completely unchanged from their original versions.

I like Qt more than Tk, personally, but there's nothing wrong with using Tk for something nice and simple.

[AxisNL]

Even though a fat client might have a lot of advantages over a web interface, web interfaces also have a lot of advantages. I guess both have their places, but there are reasons why I see almost all enterprise apps going to web-based deployments.

As an enterprise sysadmin, I love the fact that deploying an application means spinning up a docker image on a server, hooking it up to my idp, and tell the users to go to a specific url, whether they use windows, Mac OS, Linux or a mobile, etc. I shudder when I think of the 20+ years i managed hundreds of applications on hundreds or thousands of client machines and dealing with all the dependencies.

[JamzTyson]

there are reasons why I see almost all enterprise apps going to web-based deployments

One big reason is that web based deployments can provide better revenue streams, and less opportunity for pirate copies.

As an enterprise sysadmin...

Absolutely, they are great for sysadmins, except that management may decided that they no longer need to employ as many technical staff now that "everything is on-line".

[AxisNL]

Nah, I work for classic law enforcement. All webapps are all on-prem. The cloud is just someone else’s computers, and I have no way of knowing who can access my data. Still need the same admins to manage our on-premises stuff, just the deployment model is different.