Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By : Alan D. Moore
Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a lightweight, portable, and easy-to-use graphical toolkit available in the Python Standard Library, widely used to build Python GUIs due to its simplicity and availability. This book teaches you to design and build graphical user interfaces that are functional, appealing, and user-friendly using the powerful combination of Python and Tkinter. After being introduced to Tkinter, you will be guided step-by-step through the application development process. Over the course of the book, your application will evolve from a simple data-entry form to a complex data management and visualization tool while maintaining a clean and robust design. In addition to building the GUI, you'll learn how to connect to external databases and network resources, test your code to avoid errors, and maximize performance using asynchronous programming. You'll make the most of Tkinter's cross-platform availability by learning how to maintain compatibility, mimic platform-native look and feel, and build executables for deployment across popular computing platforms. By the end of this book, you will have the skills and confidence to design and build powerful high-end GUI applications to solve real-world problems.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Testing Tkinter code


Testing Tkinter code presents us with a few particular challenges. First, Tkinter handles many callbacks and methods asynchronously, meaning that we can't count on the results of some code to be apparent immediately. Also, testing GUI behaviors often relies on external factors such as window management or visual cues that our tests cannot detect.

We're going to learn some tools and strategies that will help you craft tests for your Tkinter code.

Managing asynchronous code

Whenever you interact with a Tkinter UI—whether it's clicking a button, typing in a field, or raising a window, for example—the response is not executed immediately in-place. Instead, these actions are placed in a to-do list, called an event queue, to be handled later while your code execution continues. While these actions seem instant to users, test code cannot count on a requested action being completed before the next line of code.

To solve this problem, we can use these special widget methods that...