Using a web framework as python GUI

Question

If I built some useful piece of python code to e.g. scrape a website or to calculate something big, at some point I might want to add a GUI to my project. For this I could use Tk, Qt, Pygame or any python graphic/GUI framework.

Now I also want this tool to be usable by clients without the need for a python installation. Of course I could use something like py2Exe or py2Dmg. But wouldn't it be cooler to use a python-based web framework for this? Something like Django or Pyramid.

What would be the drawbacks of doing this? Can I just use the framework to execute my code on a server and only return the result? Or will this get tricky when there are multiple users?

Answer 1

Making a web UI will make it easier to extend, and update. But it will be another layer of complexity for you to deal with.

I recommend looking at the lightweight http://webpy.org/

    urls = (
        '/hello', 'hello'
    )
    app = web.application(urls, globals())

    class hello:        
        def POST(self, name):
            #call your script here

You can call this with POST localhost/hello

Benefits:

• Portability: no installers, can access from anywhere.

• Extensibility: easyer to modify the UI (if you know HTML/CSS) and easier to re-deploy your application.

drawbacks:

• Complexity: you will need to understand HTML, CSS request/response etc, set up a webserver or shared hosting,

• Security: don't make it public.

Answer 2

If you use Django, I recommend looking at either of

• django-tastypie. With it you can build simple REST-style interfaces to your code.
• Celery. An asynchronous task framework

Since you mention calculating something bigyou are likely to need asynchronous processing. Celery is a great choice for that. It includes the ability to submit jobs via REST calls, and to check on their status.