Writing a graphical application for scientific programming ...

Writing a graphical application for
scientific programming using TraitsUI
A step by step guide for a non-programmer
Compiled with pyreport
Author: Gaël Varoquaux
Date: 2008-10-27
License: Creative Commons (CC-by-SA 3.0)
Tables of contents
1 From objects to dialogs using traitsUI 2
1.1 Object-oriented programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1.1 Objects, attributes and methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1.2 Classes and inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 An object and its representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3 Displaying several objects in the same panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.4 Writing a “graphical script” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2 From graphical to interactive 6
2.1 Object-oriented GUIs and event loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2 Reactive programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3 Breaking the flow in multiple threads 9
3.1 What are threads ? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.2 Threads in python . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.3 Getting threads and the GUI event loop to play nice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4 Extending TraitsUI: Adding a matplotlib figure to our application 12
4.1 Making a traits editor from a MatPlotLib plot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5 Putting it all together: a sample application ...