Brief introduction to wxWidgets and wxPython

wxWidgets (formerly known as wxWindows, now available at http://www.wxwidgets.org/) is a widget toolkit used for creating GUIs.

One of its most important features is cross-platform portability: it currently supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (with X11, Motif, and GTK+ libraries), OS/2, and several other operating systems and platforms (including an embedded version which is currently under development).

wxWidgets would be best described as a native mode toolkit because it provides a thin API abstraction layer across platforms, and uses platform-native widgets under the hood, as opposed to emulating them. Using native controls gives wxWidgets applications a natural and familiar look and feel.

On the other hand, introducing an additional layer can result in a slight performance penalty, although this is unlikely to be noticed in the kind of applications we will commonly develop.

wxWidgets is not restricted to GUI development and it's more than just...