Friday, September 12, 2014

From PyQt to PySide

My hobby the the last few weeks of the summer has been to port Mark Summerfield's book on PyQt to PySide (Qt is a GUI framework written in C++, and PySide/PyQt are Python bindings to this framework). (Note added: I have subsequently completed the project).

The work, so far, is up at Github in a repository called PySideSummer. Frankly, most of the work is in updating the code from 2008 (when Summerfield's book was written) to 2014. Even within PyQt, a lot has changed. We now have new-style signals-and-slots, lots of classes have been deprecated (e.g., QWorkspace), methods have become obsolete (e.g., QColor.light()), and there is a new API.

Now that I've been doing it a few weeks, I can translate between the two frameworks pretty quickly, but I am keeping my foot on the brakes. I'm taking my time because I want to actually understand what is going on in each chapter. I expect to do about a chapter a week until I'm done.

Next post: which is better: PyQt or PySide?

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