Productive GUI programming - a theory

[kkennedy]

I'm relatively new to Python programming, so forgive me for any
ignorance.  I've been reading many of the messages here in the group. 
I am currently working on a small Python project that requires a GUI
interface.  I went round and round trying to figure out which GUI
toolkit to use (finally choosing pyGTK), and I see that many others
have the same questions which to choose.

Has anyone ever tried to write a "GUI abstraction layer"?  By that, I
mean using common API "method calls" to create a GUI interface, and
"under the covers" using the appropriate binding based on OS or user
choice.  If you are familiar with the Eclipse platform
(www.eclipse.org).  It uses SWT, which is the abstraction layer.  You
write code (Java) to one API, and it translates the calls to Win32 on
Windows, GTK 2 on Linux/Unix, Motif on Linux/Unix, and several others.

I'm not saying that I'm smart enough to do this, but there are some
pretty smart people out there working on Python that could pull it
off.  It would solve a major issue with deploying Python apps... The
user will have to install each toolset, API, etc. on their computer. 
This is a hassle, especially on Linux.  Also, the developer could
learn one API, and not have to worry about specific toolkit bindings.

Just a thought.  It would definately be a huge project.