Learning Python

A Tkinter-Based GUI Editor for Managing Form Data

Let’s recap: we wrote a CGI program (feedback.py) that takes the input from a web form and stores the information on disk on our server. We then wrote a program (formletter.py) that takes some of those files and generates apologies to those deserving them. The next task is to construct a program to allow a human to look at the comments and complaints, using the Tkinter toolkit to build a GUI browser for these files.

The Tkinter toolkit is a Python-specific interface to a non-Python GUI library called Tk. Tk is the de facto choice for most Python users because it provides professional-looking GUIs within a fairly easy-to-use system. The interfaces it generates don’t look exactly like Windows, the Mac, or any Unix toolkit, but they look very close to each of them, and the same Python program works on all those platforms, which is basically impossible with any platform-specific toolkit. Another portable toolkit worth considering is wxPython (http://www.alldunn.com/wxPython).

Tk, then, is what we’ll use in this example. It’s a toolkit developed by John Ousterhout, originally as a companion to Tcl, another scripting language. Since then, Tk has been adopted by many other scripting languages including Python and Perl. For more information on Perl and Tk, see O’Reilly’s Learning Perl/Tk by Nancy Walsh.

The goals of this program are simple: to display in a window a listing of all of the feedback data items, allowing the user to select one ...