I have been looking for a decent GUI toolkit to develop some desktop programs. I worked with Java. Didn’t like the idea of typing that much to develop a app. Used php with WinBinder and PHP-GTK. Liked the first one, but the binary I have won’t load the winbinder extension. To use it, I will have to go back to php4. Again I don’t like the idea of using php4 for GUI while using php5 for web development. So again I had to make a swtich. This time I went for wxPython for Python 2.6.0. Alas, though wxPython used to work fine on my XP, it no longer runs on Windows Vista.
Finally, I deceided to work with TK which comes pre-installed with Python. The IDLE, Module Docs and other GUI tools which comes with a standard Python installations are most often developed using TK on Python.
I liked TK quite a bit because the process of developing TK GUI apps are damn easy and great fun. While learning TK, I converted my old console twitter publisher to a TK powered GUI app. Here’s the sourcecode:
Python 3 Source Code:
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import tkinter root = tkinter.Tk(); root.title("maSnun") mainFrame = tkinter.Frame(root) topFrame = tkinter.Frame(mainFrame) resFrame = tkinter.Frame(mainFrame) topFrame["height"] = 50 topFrame["width"] = 400 inputBox = tkinter.Entry(topFrame) okButton = tkinter.Button(topFrame) okButton["text"] = "OK" okButton["fg"] = "white" okButton["bg"] = "black" label = tkinter.Label(resFrame) label.pack({"side":"top"}) label["text"] = "" def ok_act(): global label,inputBox import sys; from urllib.request import urlopen,Request; import base64; username = "username"; password = "password"; url = "http://www.twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"; status = inputBox.get(); data ="status="+status; req = Request(url); req.data = data; req.headers['Authorization'] = 'Basic %s' % (base64.b64encode((username + ":" + password).encode())).decode(); # req.headers['User-Agent'] = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.20) Gecko/20081217 Firefox/2.0.0.20'; urlopen(req); label["text"] = "Tweet Published!!" label.pack({"side":"top"}) okButton["command"] = ok_act inputBox.pack({"side":"left"}) okButton.pack() topFrame.pack({"side":"top"}) topFrame.pack({"side":"top"}); resFrame.pack({"side":"top"}) mainFrame.pack() root.maxsize(400,400) root.minsize(400,400) root.mainloop(); |
It’s very comfortable to work on TK. Write less, do more. A good set of widgets and a powerful language like Python as the backend… It’s simply cool 🙂