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

Chapter 13. Asynchronous Programming with Thread and Queue

Many times, code that works flawlessly in the simplicity of a test environment encounters problems in the real world; unfortunately, this seems to be the case for your application. While your network functions ran instantaneously in your localhost-only test environment, the lab's slow VPN uplink has exposed some shortcomings in your programming. Users report that the application freezes or becomes unresponsive when network transactions are taking place. Although it does work, it looks unprofessional and is an annoyance to users.

To solve this problem, we're going to learn about the following topics:

  • How to control Tkinter's event queue
  • How to write multithreaded applications using Python's threading module
  • How to pass messages between threads using queues