On 6/23/2023 4:16 AM, Andreas Heckel via Python-list wrote:
Hi,
Apologies for potentially mis-using this thread. But I have been struggling
recently making exactly this leap from simple GUI examples to a more elaborate
MVVM concept. Mainly I have been struggling finding nice example python code
bases, that allow some understanding to the beginner, which I certainly still
am, but also show enough complexity to see the concept in action.
Any hints / links to github or similar highly welcome. If the list is not the
appropriate place, I am happy if you email me directly.
Cheers,
Andreas
-----Original Message-----
From: Python-list
On Behalf Of Diego Souza via Python-list
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2023 4:14 AM
To: aapost
Cc: python-list
Subject: Re: TKinter in Python - advanced notions
Have you considered improving the architecture itself, not your GUI library
skills?
I recommend you look at the Model View ViewModel (MVVM) concept and
implement something similar (this is largely used in the Android framework
nowadays). This would separate your program logic from the rendering and
visualization. It would also make your program more reactive, decoupled,
and easier to maintain. When you mentioned threads I immediately thought of
this because it is much easier to implement parallel jobs and present
results back in the GUI, as everything becomes reactive. This is overkill
for a small project such as the code you showed, but I recommend it for
larger projects.
As a general comment (and I have not done anything tricky or complex
with Tk), MVC or the other approaches in a similar vein, though good,
can lead you into more complexity than you need, because of the extra
abstractions involved. Yes, for sure the GUI should not be doing domain
or business logic. Yes, it's good to keep database access separate from
the other parts of your program. But you may not need all the classes
and layers that you think you might. It all depends on what you need to
do, of course.
Another useful design thought is to try to keep as much of the GUI logic
separate from Tk itself as possible. Basically, you would write a more
abstract (and simpler) GUI API, and then write an adapter that knows how
to make Tk do those things. One advantage is that this approach makes
it easier to change to another GUI toolkit later (say PyQt, for
example). Another is that it helps you avoid getting sucked into too
many Tk details that aren't needed for the program concept.
Here is a simple (or simple-minded :) ) example:
class AbstractApi:
"""An abstract class for standardizing access to a display widget."""
def __init__(self, parent):
self.parent = parent
self.client = None
def registerClient(self, client):
self.client = client
def loadPanel(self, panel_name, html):
"""Load html into display panel."""
pass
def focusPanel(self, panel_name):
"""Select a named display panel."""
pass
def handleSearchText(self):
pass
def writeStatusBar(self, msg):
pass
def handleLinkClicked(self, uri, source):
"""Handle a link clicked in the "source" display panel."""
pass
These (let us say for the purposes of illustration) are the only things
you need from the GUI. You can write a Tk-specific version of this, and
the rest of your program doesn't need to know that Tk is even involved.
If you want to change to say GTK, this class is the only thing that
would need to change.
Even if this approach turns out to be too simple for a really
complicated UI, the closer you can come to realizing it the better.
On Wed, Jun 21, 2023 at 7:20 PM aapost via Python-list <
python-list@python.org> wrote:
On 6/21/23 09:47, Dan Kolis wrote:
I've write a huge biotech program ( an IDE for synthetic biology ), and
am slowly outgrowing TKINTER.
Has anybody out there merged a little bit of TCL direct calls from
Python 3.X to get more freedom then TKINTER for just some Windows ?
I wish it looked better, but its 'ok'. I believe X11 IO is considerably
superior for serious work the HTML. I mean 'serious' work. with lots of
multi media windows. I am not talking about fb "Oh ! There is a window it
opened inthe corner !"... trivial functionality.
I don't know if it would help, but you can extend/add tcl/tk packages
I don't remember the full instructions right off, but quickly reverse
engineering my old stuff I think you just need to drop them in
/usr/share/tcltk/ or equivalent.
(I needed to do that to replace the terrible looking default file dialog
for unix/linux with fsdialog.)
then running something like the following from your Tk object
self.eval('package require fsdialog')
(reverse engineering the python tkinter source you can likely find other
ways of doing more tcl direct stuff)
I have not researched if there are some better, more featured
(non-buggy) Text widgets implemented in tcl that can be dropped in, (I
know several of the tcl drop in widgets I tried were lacking in
refinement).
From what I can tell, once upon a time there were better, more
interesting projects and tutorials on extending tkinter, such as WCK
(tkinter3000), but the only remnants of those remain publicly available
are outdated unmaintained archives.
You might also consider looking at the Grail browser source for research
purposes, as it does some interesting things with some of the widgets,
(parsing html and such), even though it is 20 years old now (and written
in python 1).
The update attempts from 10+ years ago have disappeared. (it's license
is considered questionable from what I understand, so not sure if that
is an aspect of it, the other being one of it's main features, python
applets, is unsafe and was not easily fixable)
You might already be beyond some of these things though.
I know what you mean as far is feeling like the little bit extra you
need pushes beyond what tkinter can do / makes you feel like you have
outgrown the module.
(I had to take a break from one of my projects and send it to
development hell until my UI knowledge/skills improve after I found
myself considering using xml schema appinfo annotations to store json
formatted widget specific information, lol.)
I have felt that sense of lack with most of the UI modules I have tried
though.
I don't know of a clear better python-only solution though that fits my
personal needs.
So I have to lean toward improving my tcl / C in hopes that it might
help steer me toward that extra (which seems to be in the spirit of what
tcl/tk's intent is to begin with). That will be a while for me though if
I get there.
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Diego Souza
Wespa Intelligent Systems
Rio de Janeiro - Brasil
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