Python GUI Programming Cookbook

Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook

By : Burkhard Meier

Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook

By: Burkhard Meier

Overview of this book

Python GUI Programming Cookbook

Python GUI Programming Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Author

About the Reviewers

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Creating the GUI Form and Adding Widgets

Creating the GUI Form and Adding Widgets

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

Layout Management

Layout Management

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

Look and Feel Customization

Look and Feel Customization

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

How to use the canvas widget

Data and Classes

Data and Classes

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

Matplotlib Charts

Matplotlib Charts

Creating beautiful charts using Matplotlib

Matplotlib – downloading modules using pip

Matplotlib – downloading modules with whl extensions

Creating our first chart

Placing labels on charts

How to give the chart a legend

Adjusting the scale of charts dynamically

Threads and Networking

Threads and Networking

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

Storing Data in Our MySQL Database via Our GUI

Storing Data in Our MySQL Database via Our GUI

Connecting to a MySQL database from Python

Configuring the MySQL 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

Internationalization and Testing

Internationalization and Testing

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

Extending Our GUI with the wxPython Library

Extending Our GUI with the wxPython Library

How to install the wxPython library

How to create 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

How to use Python to control two different GUI frameworks

How to communicate between the two connected GUIs

Creating Amazing 3D GUIs with PyOpenGL and PyGLet

Creating Amazing 3D GUIs with PyOpenGL and PyGLet

PyOpenGL transforms our GUI

Using bitmaps to make our GUI pretty

PyGLet transforms our GUI more easily than PyOpenGL

Our GUI in amazing colors

Creating a slideshow using tkinter

Best Practices

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

Index

Customer Reviews

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About the Author

Burkhard A. Meier has more than 15 years of professional experience working in the software industry as a software tester and developer, specializing in software test automation development, execution, and analysis. He has a very strong background in SQL relational database administration, the development of stored procedures, and debugging code.

While experienced in Visual Studio .NET C#, Visual Test, TestComplete, and other testing languages (such as C/C++), the main focus of the author over the past two years has been developing test automation written in Python 3 to test the leading edge of FLIR ONE infrared cameras for iPhone and Android smart phones as well as handheld tablets.

Being highly appreciative of art, beauty, and programming, the author developed GUIs in C# and Python to streamline everyday test automation tasks, enabling these automated tests to run unattended for weeks, collecting very useful data to be analyzed and automatically plotted into graphs and e-mailed to upper management upon completion of nightly automated test runs.

His previous jobs include working as a senior test automation engineer and designer for InfoGenesis (now Agilysys), QAD, InTouch Health, and presently, FLIR Systems.

You can get in touch with him through his LinkedIn account, https://www.linkedin.com/pub/burkhard-meier/5/246/296.

I would like to thank all truly great artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Poe, and so many more for bringing the presence of beauty into our human lives. This book is about creating very beautiful GUIs written in the Python programming language, and it was inspired by these truly great artists.

I would like to thank all of the great people that made this book possible. Without any of you, this book would only exist in my mind. I would like to especially thank all of my editors at Packt Publishing: Vivek, Arwa, Sumeet, Pramod, Nikhil and so many more. I would also like to thank all of the reviewers of the code of this book. Without them this book would be harder to read and apply to real-world problems. Last but not least, I like to thank my wife, our daughter, and our parents for the emotional support they provided so successfully during the writing of this book. I also like to give thanks to the creator of this very beautiful and powerful programming language that Python truly is. Thank you Guido.