Book Image

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, 2nd edition - Second Edition

By : Alan D. Moore
4.5 (2)
Book Image

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, 2nd edition - Second Edition

4.5 (2)
By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is widely used to build GUIs in Python due to its simplicity. In this book, you’ll discover Tkinter’s strengths and overcome its challenges as you learn to develop fully featured GUI applications. Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, Second Edition, will not only provide you with a working knowledge of the Tkinter GUI library, but also a valuable set of skills that will enable you to plan, implement, and maintain larger applications. You’ll build a full-blown data entry application from scratch, learning how to grow and improve your code in response to continually changing user and business needs. You’ll develop a practical understanding of tools and techniques used to manage this evolving codebase and go beyond the default Tkinter widget capabilities. You’ll implement version control and unit testing, separation of concerns through the MVC design pattern, and object-oriented programming to organize your code more cleanly. You’ll also gain experience with technologies often used in workplace applications, such as SQL databases, network services, and data visualization libraries. Finally, you’ll package your application for wider distribution and tackle the challenge of maintaining cross-platform compatibility.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
19
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20
Index
Appendices

Creating executables with cx_Freeze

While source and wheel distributions are useful, they both require that Python and any third-party library dependencies be installed on the system before the program can be run. Often, it would be much handier if we could provide a file or set of files that can simply be copied and run on a system without installing anything else first. Better yet, we'd like to have platform-appropriate installation packages that set up desktop shortcuts and perform other common system configurations.

There are several ways to go about this with Python code, and several projects to choose from; in this book, we're going to look at one called cx_Freeze.

The basic idea of cx_Freeze is to bundle up all the code and shared library files for a Python project along with a Python interpreter, and then generate a small executable file that will launch the code with the bundled interpreter. This approach is commonly known as freezing the code (hence the...