ltk

LTK is a little toolkit for writing web UIs in PyScript. For an explanation of PyScript and LTK, see YouTube.

For examples see:

• The LTK kitchensink for a live demo of all the widgets.
• Why use LTK? See the pitch, written with LTK, of course.
• A personal website, chrislaffra.com, which uses a number of animations, svg, styling, and timers to render a visual resume.
• An animated Holiday card where PyScript logo tree ornaments are animated using Python code in the browser using LTK.

LTK is implemented as a declarative Python library and leverages jQuery for DOM operations.

Installing LTK

Install LTK from pypi:

python3 -m pip install pyscript-ltk

Hello World

import ltk

ltk.Text("Hello World").appendTo(ltk.body)

Getting Started

To get started with LTK, we recommend you try it out on pyscript.com:

• Minimal LTK with MicroPython
• Minimal LTK with PyOdide

Widget Specification

New widget types are created by subclassing ltk.Widget:

class HBox(Widget):
    classes = [ "ltk-hbox" ]

By default, widgets are created as div DOM elements. You can choose a different tag:

class Preformatted(Widget):
    classes = [ "ltk-pre" ]
    tag = "pre"

Creating a UI

To create a UI, elements are constructed declaratively:

ltk.Table(
    ltk.TableRow(
        ltk.TableHeader("header1")
        ltk.TableHeader("header2")
    ),
    [
        ltk.TableRow(
            ltk.TableData(value1),
            ltk.TableData(value2),
        )
        for value1, value2 in data
    ],
)

Widgets are added to others by using jQuery's append and appendTo calls:

ltk.body.append(
    ltk.Table(...).element
)

container = ltk.VBox(...)
ltk.H1("This is a header").appendTo(container)

When an LTK widget is created, a corresponding jQuery element is attached to it in the ltk.Widget.__init__ constructor. It uses the tag value defined by the declaring class and the constructed element is referred to as element. As the append call is a JavaScript function, implemented by jQuery, we do not pass the LTK widget directly, but pass its element to append to the DOM.

Styling

Widgets can be styled using using three different approaches:

1. Styling with element styles using jQuery's css function:

ltk.Text("Error: Flux capacitor low!")
    .css("background-color", "red")
    .css("color", "white")
    .css("padding", 8)

2. Styling using a dict to make it easier to share styles:

error = {
    "background-color": "red",
    "color": "white",
    "padding": 8,
}
ltk.Text("Error: Flux capacitor low!", error)

3. Styling using CSS classes and an external stylesheet, using jQuery's addClass function:

ltk.Text("Some text").addClass("my-special-text)

The external style sheet should have these rules:

.ltk-text {
    font-family: Arial;
}

.my-special-text {
    font-family: Courier;
    background-color: red;
    color: white;
    padding: 8px;
}

External stylesheets can be included in the original index.html or injected at runtime from Python using:

ltk.inject_style("https://example.org/awesome_styles.css")

Events

Event handlers are attached using jQuery mechanisms.

def buy(event):
    purchase(...)

ltk.Card("Buy Now").on("click", ltk.proxy(buy))

You can also use the more declarative decorator:

@ltk.callback
def buy(event):
    purchase(...)

ltk.Card("Buy Now").on("click", buy)

Examples

See the LTK kitchensink or explore the examples folder

Applications built using LTK

• PySheets

License

LTK is covered under the Apache License:

• The Apache license is a permissive open source software license.

• It allows users to freely use, modify, and distribute the software (including for commercial purposes).

• Modified versions can be distributed without having to release the source code. Though source code changes should be documented.

• The license requires modified versions to retain the Apache license and copyright notice.

• The software is provided by the authors "as is" with no warranties.

• Users are not granted patent rights by contributors, but contributors cannot revoke patent grants for previous contributions.

• The license does not require derived works to adopt the Apache license. Though this is encouraged for consistency.

Upload new version to PyPi

If you never ran setuptools, twine, etc, on your machine do this:

python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade setuptools wheel twine build

To make a build, first increment the version in pyproject.toml:

[project]
name = "pyscript-ltk"
version = "0.1.22"

Then build the package into a source distribution and a Python wheel:

python3 -m build

Then verify whether the build works for pypi:

twine check dist/*

Then upload to the pypi test environment:

twine upload --repository pypitest dist/*

Finally, if the pypi test upload appears to work fine, run:

twine upload dist/*

If you get an error that a certain version already exists, check the contents of the dist folder.