In this book, we will explore the beautiful world of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) using the Python programming language.
Along the way, we will talk to networks, queues, the OpenGL graphical library, and many more technologies.
This is a programming cookbook. Every chapter is self-contained and explains a certain programming solution.
We will start very simply, yet throughout this book we will build a working program written in Python 3.
We will also apply some design patterns and use best practices throughout this book.
The book assumes that the reader has some basic experience using the Python programming language, but that is not really required to use this book.
If you are an experienced programmer in any programming language, you will have a fun time extending your skills to programming GUIs using Python!
Are you ready?
Let's start on our journey…
Chapter 1, Creating the GUI Form and Adding Widgets, explains the steps to develop our first GUI in Python. We will start with the minimum code required to build a running GUI application. Each recipe then adds different widgets to the GUI form.
Chapter 2, Layout Management, explores how to arrange widgets to create our Python GUI. The grid layout manager is one of the most important layout tools built into tkinter that we will be using.
Chapter 3, Look and Feel Customization, shows several examples of how to create a good "look and feel" GUI. On a practical level, we will add functionality to the Help | About menu item we created in one of the recipes.
Chapter 4, Data and Classes, discusses saving the data our GUI displays. We will start using object-oriented programming (OOP) in order to extend Python's built-in functionality.
Chapter 5, Matplotlib Charts, explains how to create beautiful charts that visually represent data. Depending upon the format of the data source, we can plot one or several columns of data within the same chart.
Chapter 6, Threads and Networking, explains how to extend the functionality of our Python GUI using threads, queues, and network connections. This will show us that our GUI is not limited at all to the local scope of our PC.
Chapter 7, Storing Data in Our MySQL Database via Our GUI, shows us how to connect to a MySQL database server. The first recipe in this chapter will show how to install the free MySQL Server Community Edition, and in the following recipes we will create databases, tables, and then load data into those tables as well as modify these data. We will also read the data back out from the MySQL server into our GUI.
Chapter 8, Internationalization and Testing, shows how to internationalize our GUI by displaying text on labels, buttons, tabs, and other widgets in different languages. We will start simple and then explore how we can prepare our GUI for internationalization at the design level. We will also explore several ways to automatically test our GUI using Python's built-in unit testing framework.
Chapter 9, Extending Our GUI with the wxPython Library, introduces another Python GUI toolkit that currently does not ship with Python. It is called wxPython, and we will be using the Phoenix version of wxPython which was designed to work well with Python 3.
Chapter 10, Creating Amazing 3D GUIs with PyOpenGL and PyGLet, shows how to transform our GUI by giving it true three-dimensional capabilities. We will use two Python third-party packages. PyOpenGL is a Python binding to the OpenGL standard, which is a graphics library that comes built-in with all major operating systems. This gives the resulting widgets a native look and feel. PyGLet is one such binding that we will explore in this chapter.
Chapter 11, Best Practices, explores different best practices that can help us to build our GUI in an efficient way and keep it both maintainable and extendible. Best practices are applicable to any good code and our GUI is no exception to designing and implementing good software practices.
All required software for this book is available online and is free of charge. This starts with Python 3 itself, and then extends to Python's add-on modules. In order to download any required software, you will need a working Internet connection.
This book is for programmers who wish to create a graphical user interface (GUI). You might be surprised by what we can achieve by creating beautiful, functional, and powerful GUIs using the Python programming language. Python is a wonderful, intuitive programming language, and is very easy to learn.
I like to invite you to start on this journey now. It will be a lot of fun!
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, and user input are shown as follows: "Using Python, we can create our own classes using the class keyword instead of the def keyword."
A block of code is set as follows:
import tkinter as tk # 1
win = tk.Tk() # 2
win.title("Python GUI") # 3
win.mainloop() # 4Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
pip install numpy-1.9.2+mkl-cp34-none-win_amd64.whl
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Next, we will add functionality to the menu items, for example, closing the main window when clicking the Exit menu item and displaying a Help | About dialog."
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