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

Separating concerns


Proper architectural design is essential for any project that needs to scale. Anyone can prop up some studs and build a garden shed, but a house or skyscraper takes careful planning and engineering. Software is no different; simple scripts can get away with shortcuts such as global variables or manipulating class properties directly, but as the program grows, our code needs to isolate and encapsulate different functionalities in a way that limits the amount of complexity we need to understand at any given moment.

We call this separation of concerns, and it's accomplished through the use of architectural patterns that describe different application components and how they interact.

The MVC pattern

Probably the most enduring of these patterns is the MVC pattern, which was introduced in the 1970s. While this pattern has evolved and spun off variations over the years, the basic gist remains: keep the data, the presentation of the data, and the application logic in separate,...