In 1995, Robin Dunn needed a
GUI application to be deployed on
HP-UX systems but also run
Windows 3.1 within short time frame. He needed a
cross-platform solution. While evaluating free and commercial solutions, he ran across
Python bindings on the wxWidgets toolkit
webpage (known as wxWindows at the time). This was Dunn's introduction to Python. Together with Harri Pasanen and Edward Zimmerman he
developed those initial bindings into wxPython 0.2. In August 1998, version 0.3 of wxPython was released. It was built for wxWidgets 2.0 and ran on Win32, with a wxGTK version in the works. The first versions of the wrapper were created by hand. However, the
code became difficult to maintain and keep synchronized with wxWidgets releases. By 1997, versions were created with
SWIG, greatly decreasing the amount of work to update the wrapper. The project is a new implementation of wxPython, focused on improving speed, maintainability and extensibility. Like the previous version of wxPython, it wraps the wxWidgets
C++ toolkit and provides access to the
user interface portions of the wxWidgets
API. With the release of 4.0.0a1 wxPython in 2017, the Project Phoenix version became the official version. wxPython 4.x is the current version being developed as of June 2022. == Use ==