GUI Applications in Python

In the last months I have spent some time trying out different GUI toolkits for Python that are cross-platform (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows). I settled with PyQt. It combines Nokia's Qt cross-platform application framework with Python so you get all the power of Qt with the simplicity of Python.

Other Desktop GUI frameworks I have tried are:

  • the Tk GUI development library included in most Python distributions
  • wxpython a blending of the wxWidgets C++ class library with Python
  • PyGTK to use the GTK+ library
Others (such as .NET using IronPython) are not running equally good on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows as they favour Windows.

From the frameworks above, PyQt  seemed the one with the most active development, the most easy usage and the best documentation. Like Qt, PyQt V4 (its newest version) is available under a variety of licenses including GNU GPL (V2 and V3; today Qt Software announced that Qt V4.5 will also be available under LGPL). If you want to write commercial applications with PyQt, you can purchase a commercial license.

I bought the book "Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt" from Mark Summerfield, that I can recommend as an excellent source of knowledge and inspiration for GUI Programming with Python and PyQt.

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