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.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Starting a thread

This recipe will show us how to start a thread. It will also demonstrate why threads are necessary to keep our GUI responsive during long-running tasks.

Getting ready

Let's first see what happens when we call a function or a method of our GUI that has sleep associated with it without using threads.

We are using sleep here to simulate a real-world application that might have to wait for a web server or database to respond, a large file transfer, or complex computations to complete its task. sleep is a very realistic placeholder and shows the principle involved.

How to do it...

...