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Python GUI Programming Cookbook, Second Edition

By : Burkhard Meier

3.4 (5)

Python GUI Programming Cookbook, Second Edition

3.4 (5)

By: Burkhard Meier

Overview of this book

Python is a multi-domain, interpreted programming language. It is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language. It is often used as a scripting language because of its forgiving syntax and compatibility with a wide variety of different eco-systems. Python GUI Programming Cookbook follows a task-based approach to help you create beautiful and very effective GUIs with the least amount of code necessary. This book will guide you through the very basics of creating a fully functional GUI in Python with only a few lines of code. Each and every recipe adds more widgets to the GUIs we are creating. While the cookbook recipes all stand on their own, there is a common theme running through all of them. As our GUIs keep expanding, using more and more widgets, we start to talk to networks, databases, and graphical libraries that greatly enhance our GUI’s functionality. This book is what you need to expand your knowledge on the subject of GUIs, and make sure you’re not missing out in the long run.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Creating the GUI Form and Adding Widgets

Creating the GUI Form and Adding Widgets

Introduction

Creating our first Python GUI

Preventing the GUI from being resized

Adding a label to the GUI form

Creating buttons and changing their text property

Text box widgets

Setting the focus to a widget and disabling widgets

Combo box widgets

Creating a check button with different initial states

Using radio button widgets

Using scrolled text widgets

Adding several widgets in a loop

Layout Management

Layout Management

Introduction

Arranging several labels within a label frame widget

Using padding to add space around widgets

How widgets dynamically expand the GUI

Aligning the GUI widgets by embedding frames within frames

Creating menu bars

Creating tabbed widgets

Using the grid layout manager

Look and Feel Customization

Look and Feel Customization

Introduction

Creating message boxes - information, warning, and error

How to create independent message boxes

How to create the title of a tkinter window form

Changing the icon of the main root window

Using a spin box control

Relief, sunken and raised appearance of widgets

Creating tooltips using Python

Adding a progressbar to the GUI

How to use the canvas widget

Data and Classes

Data and Classes

Introduction

How to use StringVar()

How to get data from a widget

Using module-level global variables

How coding in classes can improve the GUI

Writing callback functions

Creating reusable GUI components

Matplotlib Charts

Matplotlib Charts

Introduction

Creating beautiful charts using Matplotlib

Installing Matplotlib using pip with whl extension

Creating our first chart

Placing labels on charts

How to give the chart a legend

Scaling charts

Adjusting the scale of charts dynamically

Threads and Networking

Threads and Networking

Introduction

How to create multiple threads

Starting a thread

Stopping a thread

How to use queues

Passing queues among different modules

Using dialog widgets to copy files to your network

Using TCP/IP to communicate via networks

Using urlopen to read data from websites

Storing Data in our MySQL Database via our GUI

Storing Data in our MySQL Database via our GUI

Introduction

Installing and connecting to a MySQL server from Python

Configuring the MySQL database connection

Designing the Python GUI database

Using the SQL INSERT command

Using the SQL UPDATE command

Using the SQL DELETE command

Storing and retrieving data from our MySQL database

Using the MySQL workbench

Internationalization and Testing

Internationalization and Testing

Introduction

Displaying widget text in different languages

Changing the entire GUI language, all at once

Localizing the GUI

Preparing the GUI for internationalization

How to design a GUI in an agile fashion

Do we need to test the GUI code?

Setting debug watches

Configuring different debug output levels

Creating self-testing code using Python's __main__ section

Creating robust GUIs using unit tests

How to write unit tests using the Eclipse PyDev IDE

Extending Our GUI with the wxPython Library

Extending Our GUI with the wxPython Library

Introduction

Installing the wxPython library

Creating our GUI in wxPython

Quickly adding controls using wxPython

Trying to embed a main wxPython app in a main tkinter app

Trying to embed our tkinter GUI code into wxPython

Using Python to control two different GUI frameworks

Communicating between the two connected GUIs

Creating Amazing 3D GUIs with PyOpenGL and PyGLet

Creating Amazing 3D GUIs with PyOpenGL and PyGLet

Introduction

PyOpenGL transforms our GUI

Our GUI in 3D!

Using bitmaps to make our GUI pretty

PyGLet transforms our GUI easier than PyOpenGL

Our GUI in amazing colors

OpenGL animation

Creating a slide show using tkinter

Best Practices

Best Practices

Introduction

Avoiding spaghetti code

Using __init__ to connect modules

Mixing fall-down and OOP coding

Using a code naming convention

When not to use OOP

How to use design patterns successfully

Avoiding complexity

GUI design using multiple notebooks

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Text box widgets

In tkinter, the typical one-line textbox widget is called Entry. In this recipe, we will add such an Entry widget to our GUI. We will make our label more useful by describing what the Entry widget is doing for the user.

Getting ready

This recipe builds upon the Creating buttons and changing their text property recipe.

How to do it...

Check out the following code:

GUI_textbox_widget.py

Now, our GUI looks like this:

After entering some text and clicking the button, there is the following change in the GUI:

How it works...

In line 24, we get the value of the Entry widget. We have not used OOP yet, so how come we can access the value of a variable that was not even declared yet?

Without using OOP classes, in Python procedural coding, we have to physically place a name above a statement that tries to use that name. So how come this works (it does)?

The answer is that the button click event is a callback function, and by the time the button is clicked by a user, the variables referenced in this function are known and do exist.

Life is good.

Line 27 gives our label a more meaningful name; for now, it describes the text box below it. We moved the button down next to the label to visually associate the two. We are still using the grid layout manager, which will be explained in more detail in Chapter 2, Layout Management.

Line 30 creates a variable, name. This variable is bound to the Entry widget and, in our click_me() function, we are able to retrieve the value of the Entry widget by calling get() on this variable. This works like a charm.

Now we see that while the button displays the entire text we entered (and more), the textbox Entry widget did not expand. The reason for this is that we hardcoded it to a width of 12 in line 31.

Python is a dynamically typed language and infers the type from the assignment. What this means is that if we assign a string to the name variable, it will be of the string type, and if we assign an integer to name, its type will be integer.
Using tkinter, we have to declare the name variable as the type tk.StringVar() before we can use it successfully. The reason is that tkinter is not Python. We can use it from Python, but it is not the same language.

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