Dave++

I feel this is going to be a very short one this time. I’ve been testing out various graphical toolkits and I wanted to write about Tkinter. As a windows/linux user I wanted something that was truly cross platform. At work I use WPF and although I am actually more of a fan of it than most, but it does have the huge drawback of only being available on windows.

One of my friends told me about Tkinter which is a thin layer on top of a TK framework for python. While I am very much still a beginner at GUI programming, Tkinter lets you start quickly and easily. I had just started looking at it and in a very short time I was already starting to apply the MVVM pattern to what I was doing. Now while MVVM isn’t naturally supported by Tkinter it works quite well with it, which I will be blogging about soon. Now my point isn’t that MVVM works with it, it’s more that
it’s so quick to pick up that as soon as I had started playing with it I could try quite complicated things with it.

I do have one annoyance with Tkinter however, because while it is included with a fresh install of python the module name has changed in version 3.0 of python. This mean that you need to import the module like this:

import sys
# renamed module in python 3
if (sys.version_info[:2] < (3,0)):
    from Tkinter import *
else:
    from tkinter import *

This is of course only a mild annoyance but it makes the imports at the top of files look untidy.

Other than that I would recommend anyone who is trying to learn to write a GUI to try Tkinter and if you do I found An Introduction To Tkinter to be a very good resource for it even if it does looks a little dated.

Thanks for reading, and also a slightly belated apology for not posting but I’ve been in France on holiday.