Python Qt4 soup - quick way to cook up a cross-platform GUI

A friend of mine asked me to do a very quick and dirty throwaway application that parses data off a standard HTML file into an Excel spreadsheet. I chose to do it in Python and spent about an hour to decide which backend libraries to use, and opted for BeautifulSoup and xlwt to do the hard work. The core app – one function to parse input and another function to create the Excel workbook – was written in under two hours. It was only running from the command line – so I cooked him up a GUI:

This friend is a Windows user who dislikes Linux and Mac, and he needs a clean GUI that is dead simple to run and operate. After one sleepless night of furious hacking, he got one. In a Windows exe. Developed on OSX, also running under Linux. This is the power of Python combined with Qt4. The sources are online for those interested to see the details. To emphasize the throwoff nature of the app, all labels are hard-coded to Finnish.

I already had some experience on PyQt4. If you're reading this and decide to look it up, do not pass PySide – it is a newer Python Qt4 bindings library endorsed by Nokia et al. Either one you choose, you can't pass QtDesigner, which is a nice tool to design the UI and comes bundled in the Qt developer packages. In this case all I did was to add a QTableView element with some margin for the tool and status bars.

QtDesigner creates an .ui file (XML) that is translated to Python via pyuic4. With a text editor (XCode) I wrote a subclass of the UI model that extends it with a toolbar with two functions and a status bar for messages. Using file dialogs is easy. The most tricky bit is to make the data from the input file visible in the table view. PyQt4 handles that by a custom subclass of QAbstractTableModel with specific methods the Qt4 API will call to update the table contents.

Quite simple until you get to signals, slots and threading, and it doesn't hurt too much to write and maintain. Overall, about 120 lines of code for the UI, 50 lines for the core.

Now all is left is to test and package it for Windows for my friend to run. I've gotten over my worst fear and loathing of Windows, but I still have a very uneasy feeling every time I boot the OS, even in VirtualBox. Text editor and the console are my friends, and cmd.exe does not quite meet my standards, even on Windows 7. Perhaps I'll look up TCC, but honestly I'd expect a better act on behalf of Microsoft. I had a better time with 4DOS 20 years ago running on MS-DOS 5. Oh, don't even get me started on "edit.com"..

    Si si, I'm a terminal snob.

Seems that py2exe is just what I need. It installed fine via easy_install into XP. Their wiki houses the information how to construct the setup.py for py2exe to build it. Mainly, name of the main script for the executable and which libraries to bundle. It creates a whole number of files, totalling 26 MB. I was unable to generate a single executable file, but this does the trick.