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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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Setting the focus to a widget and disabling widgets

While our GUI is nicely improving, it would be more convenient and useful to have the cursor appear in the Entry widget as soon as the GUI appears. Here we learn how to do this.

Getting ready

This recipe extends the previous recipe, Text box widgets.

How to do it...

Python is truly great. All we have to do to set the focus to a specific control when the GUI appears is call the focus() method on an instance of a tkinter widget we previously created. In our current GUI example, we assigned the ttk.Entry class instance to a variable named, name_entered. Now, we can give it the focus.

Place the following code just above the code which is located at the bottom of the module and which starts the main windows event loop, like we did in the previous recipes:

GUI_set_focus.py

If you get some errors, make sure you are placing calls to variables below the code where they are declared. We are not using OOP as of yet, so this is still necessary. Later, it will no longer be necessary to do this.

On a Mac, you might have to set the focus to the GUI window first before being able to set the focus to the Entry widget in this window.

Adding this one line (38) of Python code places the cursor in our text Entry widget, giving the text Entry widget the focus. As soon as the GUI appears, we can type into this text box without having to click it first.

Note how the cursor now defaults to residing inside the text Entry box.

We can also disable widgets. To do that, we will set a property on the widget. We can make the button disabled by adding this one line (37 below) of Python code to create the button:

After adding the preceding line of Python code, clicking the button no longer creates any action:

How it works...

This code is self-explanatory. We set the focus to one control and disable another widget. Good naming in programming languages helps to eliminate lengthy explanations. Later in this book, there will be some advanced tips on how to do this while programming at work or practicing our programming skills at home.

There's more...

Yes. This is only the first chapter. There is much more to come.

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