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Glade is a graphical user interface (GUI) builder for creating your
own applications using the GTK+ (GIMP ToolKit) and
Gnome toolkits. It provides a visual tool (c.f. Visual
Basic) to interactively
create the GUI on a canvas from components (widgets) provided by the
toolkits. Interfaces can be rapidly developed and source code in a
variety of languages can be automatically generated. Glade directly
generates C source code with support for C++, Ada95, Python, Perl, and
Eiffel available within Glade via external tools. Alternatively,
and often preferably, can be used to dynamically create
the user interface directly from the XML data at run time, leading to
much simpler code.
As with many Gnome products Glade's native save format is an open
standard XML (gzip compressed) allowing the interface to be modified,
transformed, and viewed by many other XML tools (or even edited
manually in your favourite text editor if desired). Independent
applications exist that allow differently structured C source code to
be generated directly from the XML data.
In this chapter we will illustrate the use of Glade and Libglade with
the Python language, which is a simple to learn and easy to use
programming language. We begin with an overview of using Python to
generate GUIs directly in GTK+, and then using Glade. We then proceed
through the development of a sample Glade application by way of a
walk-through that will build the interface. This is followed by
walk-throughs that will turn this interface into a fully functional
application. These walk-throughs begin with a C implementation and
include packaging the application for distribution using the GNU
packaging tools (automake, autoconf, and
tar). We then walk through the use of the
library as an alternative for C. Versions of the application in Python
and C++ are also presented. We complete this chapter with reference
sections covering all aspects of Glade and some basics of the Gtk+
and Gnome toolkits.
Subsections
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