In the world of Windows and window managers, GUIs have become an inseparable component of an application. This directly translates into APIs and toolkits for building and integrating GUIs into the applications. Each language has its own set of APIs for the purpose of building the user interface. For Java it is AWT and Swing, for .Net it is Window Forms.

However, even in this area, it is the scripting languages that have the upper hand in terms of toolkits available for building GUIs. The best example is Python. It has bindings for nearly all the GUI toolkits: MFC on Windows, KDE APIs on Linux and even lesser known ones like the Fox Toolkit.

But the best of the lot is the bindings provided by QT. QT is the toolkit that has become the base for KDE. The QT bindings for Python are known as PyQT. In this discussion I will be focusing on the basics of PyQT. The first section will be about QT, the terminology of QT based development and how things are mapped in PyQT. The second section will discuss the steps required for PyQT application creation. The third section will be dedicated to the traditional hello world program, but with a twist. So let's get started.