• PyQt4

About PyQt4

PyQt4 is a set of Python bindings for Qt 4 that exposes much of the functionality of Qt 4 to Python, including:

• A comprehensive set of widgets

• Flexible layout managers

• Standard GUI features for applications (menus, toolbars, dock windows)

• Easy communication between application components (signals and slots)

• A unified painting system with transparency, anti-aliasing, OpenGL integration and SVG support

• Internationalization (i18n) support and integration with the Qt Linguist translation tool

• Rich text processing, display and printing facilities, including support for PDF export (Qt 4.1 and later)

• Database support (SQL) and model/view features

• Threading classes, providing abstractions for threads, mutexes and semaphores

• Integrated resource handling for applications

• Widget styles, including support for widget stylesheets (from Qt 4.2 onwards)

• Input/output and networking
  • Qt 4.3 and later supports Secure Sockets Layer communications

• A powerful, feature-rich graphics canvas (Qt 4.2 and later) with supported for embedding of standard widgets (Qt 4.4 and later)

• Inter-process communication for Unix via D-Bus message buses (Qt 4.2 and later)
• Text completion and undo frameworks (Qt 4.2 and later)
• XML handling APIs, including SAX, DOM, a stream-oriented API (from Qt 4.3 onwards), XQuery and XPath APIs (from Qt 4.4 onwards)

• An ECMAScript interpreter with the ability to access Qt's object model

• Support for Qt Designer, including facilities to add custom Python-based widgets to the standard set of Qt widgets available to user interface designers. See Using_Python_Custom_Widgets_in_Qt_Designer.

• Web browsing features based on WebKit, including a browser widget and classes representing Web concepts (from Qt 4.4 onwards)

• A cross-platform multimedia API based on KDE's Phonon framework (from Qt 4.4 onwards)

Note: This list only covers features up to Qt 4.4. We should perhaps list features from Qt 4.5 onwards.

Documentation and Learning Materials

Comprehensive documentation is available for PyQt4 which includes detailed class and function documentation.

An overview of PyQt4 was presented at EuroPython 2006 - see EuroPython2006Talk for more information.

PyQt4 is built using SIP, a Python bindings generator for C and C++ libraries. See the MiniSipExample for an introduction to using SIP to create bindings for your own libraries.

Note: This content is a modified version of my entry from the PythonInfo Wiki. -- David_Boddie