Introduction
Portions of the content in this chapter was adapted from Nathan Bean’s CIS 400 course at K-State, with the author’s permission. That content is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
This chapter will introduce concepts related to building a graphical user interface, or GUI (pronounced “gooey”) for our programs. Up to this point, all of our program interaction has been done either through the terminal or via input files. Most non-technical users today, however, are unfamiliar with using the terminal and prefer to interact with programs graphically. So, as developers, we should learn how to build our programs in a way that they are accessible to a wide audience of users.
The next few chapters will give us the background we need to add GUIs to our programs. However, we will focus mostly on the functionality of our interfaces, leaving overall design as an “exercise for the reader” to complete. There are many resources available to learn how to properly style and arrange the controls on our GUIs, and it is simply too much to cover in a course such as this one. In fact, most IDEs, such as NetBeans, Eclipse, and IntelliJ for Java, and PyCharm for Python, all include tools for building GUIs graphically themselves, making it even easier to build GUIs that look the way we imagine them.
Some terms we’ll cover in this chapter:
- Screen Resolution
- GUI Frameworks
- Java Swing
- Python tkinter
- UI/UX Design
- Window
- Panel
- Layout Manager
- Label
- Text Input
- Checkbox
- Radio Button
- List box
- Combo box
- X Window System (X11 or X)
- Thread
The key skill to learn in this chapter is the basic background and structure of the Java Swing and Python tkinter GUI libraries.