{"id":70001,"date":"2015-11-16T10:08:48","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T10:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/product\/uncategorized\/using-python-and-qml-to-build-native-apps\/"},"modified":"2018-03-26T21:07:09","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T21:07:09","slug":"using-python-and-qml-to-build-native-apps","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/analytics\/analytics\/using-python-and-qml-to-build-native-apps","title":{"rendered":"Using Python and QML to build native apps"},"author":5331,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_searchwp_excluded":""},"categories":[23341,22941],"tags":[23451,24341,24621,28301,24631,28311,23391],"industry":[],"product":[36921,36601],"class_list":["post-70001","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analytics","category-mapping","tag-arcgis-runtime","tag-python","tag-qml","tag-qml-api","tag-qt","tag-qt-sdk","tag-spatial-analytics","product-api-cqt","product-developers"],"acf":{"short_description":"Python is a highly efficient and intuitive language that is pervasive throughout the ArcGIS Platform, as well as the larger scientific co...","flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

Python is a highly efficient and intuitive language that is pervasive throughout the ArcGIS Platform, as well as the larger scientific community. I personally love writing Python code because you can build sophisticated scripts that accomplish a wide array of tasks with relatively little effort or lines of code. Many ArcGIS users have picked up the scripting language in recent years and have found it to be invaluable in maximizing their productivity. However, one thing that I think most Python coders would agree with me on is that it isn\u2019t very easy to make great looking UIs with Python. There are options, such as TkInter, that allow you to build up UIs from Python, but I would argue that the power of Python is in scripting procedural workflows, not in building beautiful UIs. There are, however, other languages and frameworks for building great UIs that integrate well with Python, and one of those is Qt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Qt is a cross platform SDK that is similar in functionality to .NET, and provides APIs in both C++ and QML<\/a>. For those that are not already familiar, QML is a declarative JavaScript based language that looks similar to JSON with nested JavaScript functions within it. QML is a newcomer to the ArcGIS stack, and recently emerged as one of the languages used in the ArcGIS Runtime SDK for Qt<\/a>, as well as AppStudio for ArcGIS<\/a>. QML is great for building user interfaces, and through a plugin called PyOtherSide<\/a>, integrates very well with Python. This plugin allows you to call Python scripts directly from QML. This is powerful for a few reasons:<\/p>\n