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

Building Windows executables with cx_Freeze


To get our build working correctly on Windows, we'll need to work around a couple of bugs in the current versions of cx_Freeze and Python 3.6: first, cx_Freeze relies on two environment variables pointing to the location of the Tcl and Tk libraries, which are no longer set on Windows, and, second, it fails to copy the Tcl and Tk DLL files to the program directory. Take the following steps to correct this:

  1. Start by creating a conditional block for Windows builds in cxsetup.py:
import platform
import os
if platform.system() == "Windows":
    PYTHON_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(os.__file__))

Inside the block, we're determining the directory containing our Python installation by getting the parent directory of the os library. We'll use this to locate the Tcl and Tk libraries.

  1. Now add the environment variables as follows:
os.environ['TCL_LIBRARY'] = os.path.join(PYTHON_DIR, 
'tcl', 'tcl8.6')
os.environ['TK_LIBRARY'] = os.path.join(PYTHON_DIR, 
...