| Home | David | Projects | Qt Resources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Updated: 2009-12-06 |
This page contains information about various applications and resources that I have created for use with PyQt. These tend to be oriented more to other Python, Qt and PyQt developers than to non-developers, but the interactive environments might be useful as the basis of a learning environment for users.
I also maintain some KDE resources.
Using Python in its interactive mode at the command line is a useful way to explore and learn about the features provided by modules and libraries. Unfortunately, when using GUI toolkits and frameworks such as Tk, Qt and KDE, it is usually necessary to transfer control to an event loop at some point, making it impossible to continue to execute commands at the interactive prompt.
To address this issue, I experimented with writing front ends to the Python interpreter. I wrote khpython first, to try out some ideas about visualizing Python data objects and structures.
I wrote qpython out of necessity to allow me to use PyQt interactively. Since then, ipython has been extended to work with Qt's event loop, making qpython largely redundant.
PEEQ is a version of khpython that only relies on PyQt, and which has less flexible features for visualization. It has features like tab-completion and widget capturing but, like khpython is still a work in progress.
Although one of the original aims of Python was to provide a scripting solution for applications, embedding Python can be a lot more effort than you might expect. I'm currently working on a set of examples to show how to embed a Python interpreter into a Qt application with the minimum of effort, and access widgets written in Python from C++.