Low-overhead GUI toolkit for Linux w/o X11?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2007-11-04, David Boddie <david at boddie.org.uk> wrote:

>>  1) QTopia (nee QT/Embedded).  I assume that I can probably get
>>     PyQT to work with the embedded version of QT?
>
> Qtopia Core (formerly known as Qt/Embedded) should be fairly
> painless to get working, though the embedded-specific features
> aren't supported by a plain PyQt4 build.
>
> However, it is possible to get bindings for it up and running
> - I've done it twice for different versions of Qtopia Core
>
>   http://www.diotavelli.net/PyQtWiki/PyQt4_on_the_Qtopia_Greenphone
>
> so it should be possible to get something working for the
> latest version.

That's good to hear.

> You don't really have to worry too much about having all the
> bells and whistles wrapped for use from Python, anyway.

Right, Python has it's own versions of a lot of the "extra"
stuff provided by a framework like Qt.

>>  2) PySDL or PyGame. I'm not really sure what the differences
>>     are between those two.  The latter seems to be a little
>>     more active.  Are there any traditional GUI "widgets"
>>     available for these two?
>
> PyGame is definitely more visible than PySDL. You might find
> something you can use in the list of libraries for PyGame:
>
>   http://www.pygame.org/tags/libraries
>
> There's also a list of "gui" tagged projects:
>
>   http://www.pygame.org/tags/gui

Cool.  Hadn't found that yet.

>> Which mentions the same two choices and confirms that PyQt at
>> worked at one time with Qt/E (which would lead one to believe
>> it could be made to work with QTopia).
>
> I guess I should be pushing my patches for PyQt4 back
> upstream, or at least publishing them somewhere. I suppose it
> would also be useful if I looked at making them work with a
> recent version of PyQt4 and made sure that any new widgets in
> Qtopia Core 4.3 are handled by the configuration system. This
> lets you exclude features you don't need in order to reduce
> library sizes.
>
> If you're interested in using PyQt4, I'll add an item for
> these changes near the top of my "to do" list. If not, I'll
> probably get around to doing it, but it might not happen soon.

I think we're definitely going to try to evaluate Qtopia on our
platform to see if it's any quicker and smaller than
wxWidgets/GTK+/X11.  I guess that evaluation doesn't need to
use Python -- in theory we sould be able to compare performance
of "equivalent" C/C++ apps running on wxWidgets/GTK+/X11 and on
QTopia.

-- 
Grant