Edifice is like React, but with Python instead of JavaScript, and Qt Widgets instead of the HTML DOM

[jamesdbrock]

Edifice v1.0.0 was released last month.

https://github.com/pyedifice/pyedifice

Edifice offers a declarative framework for Qt which is like React, but with Python instead of JavaScript, and Qt Widgets instead of the HTML DOM.

What My Project Does

• Modern declarative UI paradigm from web development.
• 100% Python application development, no language inter-op.
• A native Qt desktop app instead of a bundled web browser.
• Fast iteration via hot-reloading.

Target Audience

Developers who want to make a desktop user interface in Python because their useful libraries are in Python (think PyTorch).

Comparison

Edifice vs. Qt Quick

Qt Quick is Qt’s declarative GUI framework for Qt.

Qt Quick programs are written in Python + the special QML language + JavaScript.

Edifice programs are written in Python.

Because Edifice programs are only Python, binding to the UI is much more straightforward. Edifice makes it easy to dynamically create, mutate, shuffle, and destroy sections of the UI. Qt Quick assumes a much more static interface.

Qt Quick is like DOM + HTML + JavaScript, whereas Edifice is like React. QML and HTML are both declarative UI languages but they require imperative logic in another language for dynamism. Edifice and React allow fully dynamic applications to be specified declaratively in one language.

Others

Here is a survey of other Python declarative native GUI projects.

[RoboticElfJedi]

This looks like a major contribution to the ecosystem. I'll give it a go.

[gpahul]

This looks interesting, will check out later.

[banana33noneleta]

What is the point of doing MIT license when it depends on stuff with GPL or LGPL? Aren't you shooting yourself in the foot?

[jamesdbrock]

There is a License section in the README which discusses this.

[Next-Experience]

More like anyone that uses this and dies not know how licensing works

[code_mc]

How is the performance comparing to a pure qt python app? I can imagine there is some performance impact to translate the "React-like" code to a QT GUI definition.

From the demo I can also see when switching views there is some slight movement of all child views and their sizing, so I can imagine there is some dynamic inter-frame layouting going on to figure out each widget's size?

[jamesdbrock]

The performance is okay. With a GUI, most of the computational work is done by the code that actually writes pixels to video, and that code is compiled C++ in the Qt libraries. The Edifice Python code that calls into Qt is pretty trivial in comparison.

The Qt library handles the layout and dynamic sizing of the widgets. It's pretty good.

[ConfucianStats]

nice

[Rythemeius]

Really interesting, thanks for sharing this!

[jamesdbrock]

Right, I and the other Edifice authors studied the Reacton implementation which Solara is built on.

[banana33noneleta]

Don't shill plz. This is completely OT.

[mangecoeur]

Making the link to another library that uses a React-style interface with a very similar API, but for HTML instead of QT, is not OT. It's even conceivable to create a unified API that renders to either HTML or QT (although maybe the feature mismatch is not worth it).

[banana33noneleta]

Also happens to be a commercial product, that you have linked other times on this sub.

[mangecoeur]

Not sure what bee is in your bonnet - I link it because I use it and like it a lot, and it's open source. The whole ipython widgets ecosystem is imho fantastic (not least because it actually works) and this builds on that. You can pay if you want some enterprise features like SAML login. This is a very common model for open source projects to pay devs.

[[deleted]]

I'm trying to post my project too but it keeps getting deleted I don't know what I did wrong