To automatically generate these bindings, Phil Thompson developed the tool SIP, which is also used in other projects. In August 2009, Nokia, the then owners of the Qt toolkit, released PySide, providing similar functionality, but under the LGPL, after failing to reach an agreement with Riverbank Computing to change its licensing terms to include LGPL as an alternative license.
The QtGui module contains the majority of the GUI classes. These include a number of table, tree and list classes based on the model–view–controller design pattern. Also provided is a sophisticated 2D canvas widget capable of storing thousands of items including ordinary widgets.
The QtNetwork module contains classes for writing UDP and TCP clients and servers. It includes classes that implement FTP and HTTP clients and support DNS lookups. Network events are integrated with the event loop making it very easy to develop networked applications.
The QtOpenGL module contains classes that enable the use of OpenGL in rendering 3D graphics in PyQt applications.
The QtSql module contains classes that integrate with open-source and proprietary SQL databases. It includes editable data models for database tables that can be used with GUI classes. It also includes an implementation of SQLite.
The QtSvg module contains classes for displaying the contents of SVG files. It supports the static features of SVG 1.2 Tiny.
The QtXml module implements SAX and DOM interfaces to Qt's XML parser.
The QtMultimedia module implements low-level multimedia functionality. Application developers would normally use the phonon module.
The QtDesigner module contains classes that allow Qt Designer to be extended using PyQt.
The Qt module consolidates the classes contained in all of the modules described above into a single module. This has the advantage that you don't have to worry about which underlying module contains a particular class. It has the disadvantage that it loads the whole of the Qt framework, thereby increasing the memory footprint of an application. Whether you use this consolidated module, or the individual component modules is down to personal taste.
The uic module implements support for handling the XML files created by Qt Designer that describe the whole or part of a graphical user interface. It includes classes that load an XML file and render it directly, and classes that generate Python code from an XML file for later execution.
PyQt5 contains the following Python modules:
QtQml Module
QtQtuick Module
QtCore Module
QtGui Module
QtPrintSupport Module
QtWidgets Module
QGLContext Module
QGLFormat Module
QGLWidget Module
QtWebKit Module
QtWebKitWidgets Module
Versions
PyQt version 4 works with both Qt 4 and Qt 5. PyQt version 5 only supports Qt version 5, and drops support for features that are deprecated in Qt 5.
Hello World example
The below code shows a small window on the screen.
PyQt4
! /usr/bin/env python3
Character Encoding: UTF-8
Here we provide the necessary imports.
The basic GUI widgets are located in QtGui module.
import sys from PyQt4.QtGui import QApplication, QWidget
Every PyQt4 application must create an application object.
The application object is located in the QtGui module.
app = QApplication
The QWidget widget is the base class of all user interface objects in PyQt4.
We provide the default constructor for QWidget. The default constructor has no parent.
A widget with no parent is called a window.
root = QWidget root.resize # The resize method resizes the widget. root.setWindowTitle # Here we set the title for our window. root.show # The show method displays the widget on the screen. sys.exit) # Finally, we enter the mainloop of the application.
PyQt5
! /usr/bin/env python3
Character Encoding: UTF-8
Here we provide the necessary imports.
The basic GUI widgets are located in QtWidgets module.
import sys from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QWidget
Every PyQt5 application must create an application object.
The application object is located in the QtWidgets module.
app = QApplication
The QWidget widget is the base class of all user interface objects in PyQt5.
We provide the default constructor for QWidget. The default constructor has no parent.
A widget with no parent is called a window.
root = QWidget root.resize # The resize method resizes the widget. root.setWindowTitle # Here we set the title for our window. root.show # The show method displays the widget on the screen. sys.exit) # Finally, we enter the mainloop of the application.
