Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By : Bhaskar Chaudhary
Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By: Bhaskar Chaudhary

Overview of this book

Tkinter is the built-in GUI package that comes with standard Python distributions. It is a cross-platform package, which means you build once and deploy everywhere. It is simple to use and intuitive in nature, making it suitable for programmers and non-programmers alike. This book will help you master the art of GUI programming. It delivers the bigger picture of GUI programming by building real-world, productive, and fun applications such as a text editor, drum machine, game of chess, audio player, drawing application, piano tutor, chat application, screen saver, port scanner, and much more. In every project, you will build on the skills acquired in the previous project and gain more expertise. You will learn to write multithreaded programs, network programs, database-driven programs, asyncio based programming and more. You will also get to know the modern best practices involved in writing GUI apps. With its rich source of sample code, you can build upon the knowledge gained with this book and use it in your own projects in the discipline of your choice.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Setting up a broad GUI structure

Let's now set up the broad GUI elements of our program. We will create a PaintApplication class in 6.01.py. Since we want to draw the menu using our framework, we import the framework into our file and inherit from the Framework class as follows:

import framework

class PaintApplication(framework.Framework):

def __init__(self, root):
super().__init__(root)
self.create_gui()

The __init__ method calls another method, create_gui, which is responsible for creating the basic GUI structure for our program.

The create_gui method simply delegates the task to five separate methods, each being responsible for creating one section of the GUI as follows (see code 6.01.py):

def create_gui(self):
self.create_menu()
self.create_top_bar()
self.create_tool_bar()
self.create_drawing_canvas()
self.bind_menu_accelrator_keys()

These five methods together...