Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Burkhard Meier
Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

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.

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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Title Page
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Customer Feedback
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
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
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
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
6
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
7
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
8
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
9
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
10
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
11
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

Preventing the GUI from being resized

By default, a GUI created using tkinter can be resized. This is not always ideal. The widgets we place onto our GUI forms might end up being resized in an improper way, so in this recipe, we will learn how to prevent our GUI from being resized by the user of our GUI application.

Getting ready

This recipe extends the previous one, Creating our first Python GUI, so one requirement is to have typed the first recipe yourself into a project of your own, or download the code from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Python-GUI-Programming-Cookbook-Second-Edition/.

How to do it…

We are preventing the GUI from being resized, look at:GUI_not_resizable.py

Running the code creates this GUI:

How it works…

Line 18 prevents the Python GUI from being resized.

Running this code will result in a GUI similar to the one we created in the first recipe. However, the user can no longer resize it. Also, note how the maximize button in the toolbar of the window is grayed out.

Why is this important? Because once we add widgets to our form, resizing can make our GUI look not as good as we want it to be. We will add widgets to our GUI in the next recipes.

The resizable() method is of the Tk() class, and by passing in (False, False), we prevent the GUI from being resized. We can disable both the x and y dimensions of the GUI from being resized, or we can enable one or both dimensions by passing in True or any number other than zero. (True, False) would enable the x-dimension but prevent the y-dimension from being resized.

We also added comments to our code in preparation for the recipes contained in this book.

Note

In visual programming IDEs such as Visual Studio .NET, C# programmers often do not think of preventing the user from resizing the GUI they developed in this language. This creates inferior GUIs. Adding this one line of Python code can make our users appreciate our GUI.

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