Python GUI Programming Cookbook

Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook

By : Burkhard Meier

Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook

By: Burkhard Meier

Overview of this book

Python GUI Programming Cookbook

Python GUI Programming Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Author

About the Reviewers

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Creating the GUI Form and Adding Widgets

Creating the GUI Form and Adding Widgets

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

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

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

How to use the canvas widget

Data and Classes

Data and Classes

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

Creating beautiful charts using Matplotlib

Matplotlib – downloading modules using pip

Matplotlib – downloading modules with whl extensions

Creating our first chart

Placing labels on charts

How to give the chart a legend

Adjusting the scale of charts dynamically

Threads and Networking

Threads and Networking

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

Connecting to a MySQL database from Python

Configuring the MySQL 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

Internationalization and Testing

Internationalization and Testing

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

How to install the wxPython library

How to create 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

How to use Python to control two different GUI frameworks

How to communicate between the two connected GUIs

Creating Amazing 3D GUIs with PyOpenGL and PyGLet

Creating Amazing 3D GUIs with PyOpenGL and PyGLet

PyOpenGL transforms our GUI

Using bitmaps to make our GUI pretty

PyGLet transforms our GUI more easily than PyOpenGL

Our GUI in amazing colors

Creating a slideshow using tkinter

Best Practices

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

Index

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Quickly adding controls using wxPython

In this recipe, we will recreate the GUI we originally created earlier in this book with tkinter , but this time, we will be using the wxPython library. We will see how easy and quick it is to use the wxPython GUI toolkit to create our own Python GUIs.

We will not recreate the entire functionality we created in previous chapters. For example, we will not internationalize our wxPython GUI nor connect it to a MySQL database. We will recreate the visual aspects of the GUI and add some functionality.

Note

Comparing different libraries gives us the choice of which toolkits to use for our own Python GUI development and we can combine several of those toolkits in our own Python code.

Getting ready

Ensure you have the wxPython module installed to follow this recipe.

How to do it...

First, we create our Python OOP class as we did before using tkinter, but this time we inherit from and extend the wx.Frame class. For clarity reasons, we no longer call our class OOP but...