For a part of project, the demands for the gui interface enforce me to find a simple and flexibile toolkit-like to develop a desktop programming. the two main choices are the Swing and wxPython. The java things bores me a lot in before. So I decide to try something new, since I have a lot of interest in python recently.

Modules introduction

wxPython is a cross platform toolkit for creating desktop GUI applications. the principal author is Robin Dunn. wxPython consists of the five basic modules.

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|-- Controls: provides the common widgets, such as Button, Toolbar.
|-- Core: consists of elementary classes. Object, Sizers, Events.
|-- GDI: used for drawing onto the widgets.
|-- Misc: various other classes and modules. logging, configuration.
|-- Windows: consists of various windows. Panel, Dialog, Frame etc.

Widgets are called controls in windows. GUI programming is a tedious project, the main reason lies in that the inner logical flow troubles me a lot. such as when you try to create a menuitem, you should first contruct a MenuBar object, then a Menu object, and then construct a menuitem, finnally append the menu object to the menubar object. Also you should bing the event to the itemmenu object.

Sizer

The programmer specifies the position and the size of each widget in pixels. when you use the absolute positions, you should understand several things: - when you resize the window, the size and the position of widgets do not change. - applications look different on various platforms. - changing fonts might spoiled the layout. - it's difficult to redo the layout.

Sizer address all those issues, we can choose among these sizers: . |-- wx.BoxSizer enable us to put several widgets into row or column. |-- wx.GridSizer lays out widgets in two dimensional table, each cell has the same size. |-- wx.FlexGridSizer all cells have same height in a row. |-- wx.BagSizer the most complicated sizer.

Events

Events are integral part of every GUI application. All GUI application are event-driven. Event object is an object associated with the event. It is usually a window. Event type is a unique event, that has been generated. Event binder is an object, that binds an event type with an event handler.

Widgets

• wx.Button
• wx.ToggleButton
• wx.StaticLine
• wx.StaticText
• wx.StaticBox it is used to logically group various widgets.
• wx.ComboBox a single line text field, a button with a down arrow image and a listbox.
• wx.CheckBox notice that, like the togglebox, it has two states.
• wx.StatusBar
• wx.RadioButton
• wx.Gauge It has an indicator to show the current state of a task.
• wx.Slider
• wx.SpinCtrl

reference

[1]: *wxPython tutorial *