[PyKDE] SIP and PyQT on Windoze

[bacon at aerodyne.com]

I am investigating various libraries and utilities for building a cross
platform GUI front end to a complex engineering code.  The front end
would have very limited distribution due to the nature of the
underlying code it will control.  Few people have a need to investigate
the questions being answered by our research codes.   Because of this,
there is a small user base and relatively little support money
available.  This leads to a number of restrictions on the technologies
to be used.

1) Must support Unix, should support Windows95/98/NT
2) Limited customer base (25-50 users) means it must be low cost
3) Due to the problem of orphaned toolkits, source code must be
   available and actively developed without undergoing capricious API
   changes.  I can't afford to rework two months of work because
   someone else thought of new and different way to implement something.

I had initially decided to use Qt as my solution.  Now comes the more
relevant part for this mailing list.  In discussions with other members
of the user community, it seems that extensibility would be a highly
valued feature.  I would like to use Python as my extension language of
choice, but it needs to be able to access whatever GUI toolkit is used. 

Does PyQt run on Windows?  What are the long term survivability
prospects of PyQt?  As new versions of Qt are made available, how
quickly are new releases of PyQt made?  

I selected Qt because of its wide user base.  We've already been burned
once when a commercial software vendor abandoned the GUI toolkit we used
to develop a product.  Four man years of work were flushed down the
toilet by that fiasco.  I don't want it to happen again.  I feel
confident that Qt and Python will each remain viable, but I'm not as
confident in SIP and PyQt.

Does anyone have any thoughts, suggestions or recommendations?

-- 
Fred Bacon

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