Book Image

Tkinter GUI Programming by Example

Book Image

Tkinter GUI Programming by Example

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a modular, cross-platform application development toolkit for Python. When developing GUI-rich applications, the most important choices are which programming language(s) and which GUI framework to use. Python and Tkinter prove to be a great combination. This book will get you familiar with Tkinter by having you create fun and interactive projects. These projects have varying degrees of complexity. We'll start with a simple project, where you'll learn the fundamentals of GUI programming and the basics of working with a Tkinter application. After getting the basics right, we'll move on to creating a project of slightly increased complexity, such as a highly customizable Python editor. In the next project, we'll crank up the complexity level to create an instant messaging app. Toward the end, we'll discuss various ways of packaging our applications so that they can be shared and installed on other machines without the user having to learn how to install and run Python programs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 9. Connecting – Getting Our Chat Client Online

In this chapter, we will be connecting our chat application to a web service written using the flask microframework. We will learn how to write a small flask application that handles HTTP requests and updates a sqlite database in the process. We will then take advantage of the requests module to allow for easy communication between a graphical application and a web service.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Using the flask module to create a web service
  • Handling both GET and POST requests in flask
  • Using a sqlite database for persistent storage
  • Making HTTP requests using the requests module

Let's begin by having a look at flask. We'll take a tour of what it is and how it works before using it to create a web service that can handle which users exist in our chat application and who is allowed to talk to whom.