**README** for PLIB3.GUI 0.9.5

:Author:        Peter A. Donis
:Release Date:  11 Jul 2013

The PLIB3.GUI package contains a simple GUI application framework
with two main features:

- It lets the same high-level code work with a number of
  different underlying GUI toolkits. Currently supported:
  Qt 4, PySide, KDE 4, and wxPython. (The original reason
  for writing this sub-package was that wxWidgets doesn't
  use Qt and I like the Qt/KDE widgets better, but Qt was
  not available for Windows and I wanted code that would
  run cross-platform.) Note that the KDE 4 and wxPython
  toolkits are untested at this time.

- It allows you to express the layout of your GUI in terms
  of Python lists and dicts, enabling a much more declarative
  and easy to read (and maintain) coding style.

Other than selecting the toolkit (which may not be necessary:
the main module of the sub-package can 'auto-detect' which
toolkit to use--the ``plib-setup-gui`` post-install script
does most of the work to enable this--so you only need to
override if you don't like the default), you should not have
to worry about any toolkit internal details; the goal of this
sub-package is to make them all look the same to your code.

Note: PLIB3.GUI works with Python 3. If you are using Python
2.7, see the PLIB.GUI package, available at
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/plib.gui.

The ``setup.py`` script for PLIB3.GUI uses the ``setuputils``
helper module, which helps to automate away much of the
boilerplate in Python setup scripts. This module is available
as a separate release at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuputils3.

Installation
------------

To install PLIB3.GUI, you can simply run::

    $ python setup.py install

at a shell prompt from the directory into which you
unzipped the source tarball (the same directory that this
README file is in). This will install PLIB3 and then
run each of the post-install scripts in the scripts
directory.

Example Programs
----------------

PLIB3.GUI comes with example programs that illustrate key features
of the package. After installation, these can be found in the
``$PREFIX/share/plib/examples`` directory. If you have a
POSIX system (Linux or Mac OSX), the ``plib-setup-examples``
post-install script will install symlinks to the example
programs in the ``$PREFIX/bin`` directory.

The Zen of PLIB3
----------------

There is no single unifying purpose or theme to PLIB3, but
like Python itself, it does have a 'Zen' of sorts:

- Express everything possible in terms of built-in Python
  data structures.

- Once you've expressed it that way, what the code is
  going to do with it should be obvious.

- Avoid boilerplate code, *and* boilerplate data. Every
  piece of data your program needs should have one and
  only one source.

Copyright and License
---------------------

PLIB3.GUI is Copyright (C) 2008-2013 by Peter A. Donis.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version. (See the LICENSE file for a
copy of version 2 of the License.)

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
