Fast and easy GUI prototyping with Python

[Michael Torrie]

erokar at gmail.com wrote:
> 2) The Qt vs. .NET API. I have no experience with Qt's API and a
> rudimentary experience with the .NET API (seems powerfull but also big
> and complex).

Qt's API is very very good.  Easy to use and extremely powerful.  Note
that in Python a number of Qt's APIs are not used in favor of Python
native apis for things like file and socket I/O, IPC, Threads, and so
forth.  Additionally, PyQT does allow you the flexibility to move to
other platforms.  That need may not exist for you now, but it never
makes sense to me to needlessly lock yourself down.  As far as GUI
design goes, Qt and SWF would be on par, likely.  It's a bit of a
misnomer to be comparing Qt to the .NET API.  In IronPython you can of
course leverage all the class libraries in the CLR, but most python
programmers prefer to use python native libraries wherever possible.  If
you follow that, then it's SWF that compares to Qt.  I've not used VS
2008's SWF gui designer, but of all the designers I've seen so far, Qt's
Designer is the best I've ever used.  I don't ever use code generation
(GUIs should be created from the XML definitions), so integration with
an IDE is not a concern for me.

One issue about Qt is licensing, which could completely kill it for you.
 Although technically PyQt would insulate you from this issue to a
point, TrollTech will not license Qt for your use in a non-GPL project
if you began developing the project using the GPL version of Qt.