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

Tkinter's event queue


As we discussed in Chapter 10Creating Automated Tests with unittest, many tasks in Tkinter, such as drawing and updating widgets, are done asynchronously, rather than taking immediate action when called in code. More specifically, the actions you perform in Tkinter—clicking a button, triggering a key bind or trace, resizing a window—place an event in the event queue. On each iteration of the main loop, Tkinter pulls one event from the queue and executes it.

Tasks in the event queue are roughly prioritized as regular or do-when-idle (often just called idle tasks), meaning they are to be run when every regular task in the queue has been done. Most drawing or widget-updating tasks are idle tasks, while actions like callbacks are, by default, regular priority.

Because of this, a callback task that blocks for an extended period of time can cause the program to seem frozen or stuck at an awkward point, since draw events and other idle tasks are waiting for it to complete...