Book Image

Learning Python Application Development

By : Ninad Sathaye
Book Image

Learning Python Application Development

By: Ninad Sathaye

Overview of this book

Python is one of the most widely used dynamic programming languages, supported by a rich set of libraries and frameworks that enable rapid development. But fast paced development often comes with its own baggage that could bring down the quality, performance, and extensibility of an application. This book will show you ways to handle such problems and write better Python applications. From the basics of simple command-line applications, develop your skills all the way to designing efficient and advanced Python apps. Guided by a light-hearted fantasy learning theme, overcome the real-world problems of complex Python development with practical solutions. Beginning with a focus on robustness, packaging, and releasing application code, you’ll move on to focus on improving application lifetime by making code extensible, reusable, and readable. Get to grips with Python refactoring, design patterns and best practices. Techniques to identify the bottlenecks and improve performance are covered in a series of chapters devoted to performance, before closing with a look at developing Python GUIs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning Python Application Development
Credits
Disclaimers
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Overview of GUI frameworks


A user interface is typically something that a user can see and use to communicate with the application. So far, we have presented a text-based user interface. For example, in the Attack of the Orcs application, the user was prompted to specify a hut number, and based on the number entered, further actions were taken.

A Graphical User Interface (GUI), on the other hand, presents an interface to the user that may have buttons, icons, text fields, graphics, and so on. There are several Python GUI frameworks available. Many of these are based on cross-platform technologies such as Tk, Qt, wxWidgets, and others. Let's briefly discuss some of the most popular frameworks. The purpose is to just make you aware of the GUI technologies available.

Tkinter

Tkinter provides Python bindings or interface to the open source Tk GUI widget toolkit. For more information on Tk, see its official website, http://www.tcl.tk/. It is available as a standard module in Python. What this...