Chapter 20. GUI Development

In this chapter, we examine the various options for developing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in Python.

We will look in some detail at three of the GUI toolkits that operate on the Windows platform: Tkinter, PythonWin, and wxPython. Each of these GUI toolkits provide a huge range of facilities for creating user interfaces, and to completely cover any of these toolkits is beyond the scope of this single chapter. Each framework would need its own book to do it justice.

Our intent in this chapter is to give you a feel for each of these GUI frameworks, so you can understand the basic model they use and the problems they were designed to address. We take a brief tour of each of these toolkits, describing their particular model and providing sample code along the way. Armed with this information, you can make an informed decision about which toolkit to use in which situation, have a basic understanding of how your application will look, and where it will run when finished.

The authors need to express their gratitude to Gary Herron for the Tkinter section, and Robin Dunn for the wxPython section. Their information helped us complete this chapter.

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