Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By : Bhaskar Chaudhary
Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By: Bhaskar Chaudhary

Overview of this book

Tkinter is the built-in GUI package that comes with standard Python distributions. It is a cross-platform package, which means you build once and deploy everywhere. It is simple to use and intuitive in nature, making it suitable for programmers and non-programmers alike. This book will help you master the art of GUI programming. It delivers the bigger picture of GUI programming by building real-world, productive, and fun applications such as a text editor, drum machine, game of chess, audio player, drawing application, piano tutor, chat application, screen saver, port scanner, and much more. In every project, you will build on the skills acquired in the previous project and gain more expertise. You will learn to write multithreaded programs, network programs, database-driven programs, asyncio based programming and more. You will also get to know the modern best practices involved in writing GUI apps. With its rich source of sample code, you can build upon the knowledge gained with this book and use it in your own projects in the discipline of your choice.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Tkinter and threading

One of the simplest ways that we can make our root window responsive is to use the root.update() method within our play_pattern loop. This updates the root.mainloop() method after each sound sample is played.

However, this is an inelegant method because the control is passed to the main loop with some staggering experienced in the GUI. Thus, you may experience a slight delay in the responses of other widgets in the Toplevel window.

Further, if some other event causes the method to be called, it could result in a nested event loop.

A better solution would be to run the play_pattern method from a separate thread.

Let's use the threading module of Python to play the pattern in a separate thread. This way, pygame will not interfere with Tkinter's main loop.

A thread is a coding construct that can advance two or more separate sets of logical workflow...