Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Burkhard Meier

Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Burkhard Meier

Overview of this book

Python is a multi-domain, interpreted programming language that is easy to learn and implement. With its wide support for frameworks to develop GUIs, you can build interactive and beautiful GUI-based applications easily using Python. This third edition of Python GUI Programming Cookbook follows a task-based approach to help you create effective GUIs with the smallest amount of code. Every recipe in this book builds upon the last to create an entire, real-life GUI application. These recipes also help you solve problems that you might encounter while developing GUIs. This book mainly focuses on using Python’s built-in tkinter GUI framework. You'll learn how to create GUIs in Python using simple programming styles and object-oriented programming (OOP). As you add more widgets and expand your GUI, you will learn how to connect to networks, databases, and graphical libraries that greatly enhance the functionality of your GUI. You’ll also learn how to use threading to ensure that your GUI doesn't become unresponsive. Toward the end, you’ll learn about the versatile PyQt GUI framework, which comes along with its own visual editor that allows you to design GUIs using drag and drop features. By the end of the book, you’ll be an expert in designing Python GUIs and be able to develop a variety of GUI applications with ease.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Free Chapter

Creating the GUI Form and Adding Widgets

Creating the GUI Form and Adding Widgets

Creating our first Python GUI

Preventing the GUI from being resized

Adding a label to the GUI form

Creating buttons and changing their text attributes

Creating textbox widgets

Setting the focus to a widget and disabling widgets

Creating combobox widgets

Creating a check button with different initial states

Using radio button widgets

Using scrolled text widgets

Adding several widgets in a loop

Layout Management

Layout Management

Arraning several labels within a label frame widget

Using padding to add space around widgets

Dynamically expanding the GUI using widgets

Aligning GUI widgets by embedding frames within frames

Creating menu bars

Creating tabbed widgets

Using the grid layout manager

Look and Feel Customization

Look and Feel Customization

Creating message boxes – information, warning, and error

How to create independent message boxes

How to create the title of a tkinter window form

Changing the icon of the main root window

Using a spin box control

Applying relief – the sunken and raised appearance of widgets

Creating tooltips using Python

Adding Progressbar to the GUI

How to use the canvas widget

Data and Classes

Data and Classes

How to use StringVar()

How to get data from a widget

Using module-level global variables

How coding in classes can improve the GUI

Writing callback functions

Creating reusable GUI components

Matplotlib Charts

Matplotlib Charts

Installing Matplotlib using pip with the .whl extension

Creating our first chart

Placing labels on charts

How to give the chart a legend

Adjusting the scale of charts dynamically

Threads and Networking

Threads and Networking

How to create multiple threads

Starting a thread

Stopping a thread

How to use queues

Passing queues among different modules

Using dialog widgets to copy files to your network

Using TCP/IP to communicate via networks

Using urlopen to read data from websites

Storing Data in Our MySQL Database via Our GUI

Storing Data in Our MySQL Database via Our GUI

Installing and connecting to a MySQL server from Python

Configuring the MySQL database connection

Designing the Python GUI database

Using the SQL INSERT command

Using the SQL UPDATE command

Using the SQL DELETE command

Storing and retrieving data from our MySQL database

Using MySQL Workbench

Internationalization and Testing

Internationalization and Testing

Displaying widget text in different languages

Changing the entire GUI language all at once

Localizing the GUI

Preparing the GUI for internationalization

How to design a GUI in an agile fashion

Do we need to test the GUI code?

Setting debug watches

Configuring different debug output levels

Creating self-testing code using Python's __main__ section

Creating robust GUIs using unit tests

How to write unit tests using the Eclipse PyDev IDE

Extending Our GUI with the wxPython Library

Extending Our GUI with the wxPython Library

Installing the wxPython library

Creating our GUI in wxPython

Quickly adding controls using wxPython

Trying to embed a main wxPython app in a main tkinter app

Trying to embed our tkinter GUI code into wxPython

Using Python to control two different GUI frameworks

Communicating between the two connected GUIs

Building GUIs with PyQt5

Building GUIs with PyQt5

Installing PyQt5

Installing the PyQt5 Designer tool

Writing our first PyQt5 GUI

Changing the title of the GUI

Refactoring our code into object-oriented programming

Inheriting from QMainWindow

Adding a status bar widget

Adding a menu bar widget

Starting the PyQt5 Designer tool

Previewing the form within the PyQt5 Designer

Saving the PyQt5 Designer form

Converting Designer .ui code into .py code

Understanding the converted Designer code

Building a modular GUI design

Adding another menu item to our menu bar

Connecting functionality to the Exit menu item

Adding a Tab Widget via the Designer

Using layouts in the Designer

Adding buttons and labels in the Designer

Best Practices

Avoiding spaghetti code

Using __init__ to connect modules

Mixing fall-down and OOP coding

Using a code naming convention

When not to use OOP

How to use design patterns successfully

Avoiding complexity

GUI design using multiple notebooks

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Building GUIs with PyQt5

In this chapter, we will introduce another Python GUI toolkit, named PyQt5, which is truly excellent. PyQt5 has similar capabilities to tkinter but comes with a very nice Visual Designer tool that lets us drag and drop widgets onto a form. We will also use another tool that converts the Designer .ui code into Python code.

After visually designing our GUI in the Designer and then converting the code into Python code, we will continue using pure Python to add functionality to our widgets. First, we will install PyQt5 and the Designer before writing a simple PyQt5 GUI without the Designer. After that, we will visually design our GUI.

Knowing how to use PyQt5, and the Visual Designer tool and how to convert .ui into .py code will add great skills to your Python GUI development toolbox. From this, you will learn how to create powerful and complex GUIs, as well...