Goals

This is a young project. Here we articulate its design principles and goals.

1. This is a library of reusable Graphic User Interface (GUI) components, not an extensible application. There is no plugin architecture; there are no configuration files.

2. It ships with some runnable example applications, but it’s presumed that in order to build something really useful to users, someone will need to write Python GUI code—perhaps starting by copy/pasting one of those example applications, or by integrating some of these widgets into an existing application.

3. Anything you can do with a mouse, you can do with code through a programmatic interface. These widgets are intended to be run alongside an embedded IPython console or launched within IPython or Jupyter (but they don’t have to be).

4. There is a need for both web- and desktop-based solutions, and the space of GUI frameworks is ever-changing, especially on the web. From the start, we are building in front-ends for Qt and Jupyter with examples of how to embed these components in the existing Qt applications such as Xi-CAM, PyFAI, PyMca, napari, and PyDM, using their respective extension points.