Many of the scripting languages we teach include the ability to provide a GUI - a Graphic User Interface. I'll describe some particular GUIs later in this article, but let's start with ...
THE PRINCIPLES OF GUI PROGRAMMING
Writing a GUI based program is very different to writing a command line one - although you'll find if you've done a good design that you can use shared named blocks of code (subs, procs, functions or methods depending on the language) from both so you shouldn't have a major rework to write a GUI.
All the programming work of a GUI is done in the SETUP CODE.
You define a set of components (commonly known as widgets) which you want to appear
You describe how they're to be laid out using a geometry manager
You give a list of things that may happen (events) and define what's to
happen when an event occurs
And you then enter a main program loop that
Displays the GUI
Awaits events
Acts on the events
COMMONLY AVAILABLE GUIS
Tk - "Toolkit". Originally written by John Ousterhout to go with Tcl, Tcl/Tk is now a major use of Tcl - the Tool Control Language. It's also available in Python (Tkinter) and in Perl (Perl/Tk), though not as widely used there as it is with Tcl
Links
- Tcl/Tk
information and
training
- Tkinter
information and
training
- Perl/Tk
information and
training
wx - as in wxPython. A more recent windowing system originating from Python's support of the Windows Graphics look and feel. Now gaining great popularity.
Link
- wxPython
information and
training
Qt - Qt is a very powerful GUI library written in C++ and originally intended as a GUI for that language; it's available and well supported by Python.
Link
- PyQt
information and
training
AWT and Swing - The AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit) is Java's low level GUI. More complex components which allow realistic code to be written within sorter pieces of code may be found in Swing.
PHP isn't often used for stand alone applications, but you
can
use it through a GUI with GTK.
All of the GUIs mentioned are available / can run on Windows systems, on Mac OS X systems, and on Linux and Unix systems running the X Windows system; in the majority of cases, they'll use the graphics and the look and feel of those systems.
If you're writing a web application, you're likely to design the look and feel of your page (your GUI) using HTML and then use a system such as CGI (programmed in Perl of Python) or PHP in order to provide the equivalent of event handling.
Links
- Perl and Perl on the Web training
- Python (including web use) training
- PHP training
See also 2 day course - the Tk GUI
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