Glade is an interface builder for the open-source GTK toolkit library for X.[82] Glade allows you to develop a GUI interface by interactively picking, placing, and modifying widgets on an interface panel. The GUI editor produces an XML file describing the interface; this, in turn, can be fed to one of several code generators that will actually grind out C, C++, Python or Perl code for the interface. The generated code then calls functions you write to supply behavior to the interface.
Glade's XML format for describing GUIs is a good example of a simple domain-specific minilanguage. See Example8.1 for a “Hello, world!” GUI in Glade format.
Example8.1.Glade “Hello, World”.
<?xml version="1.0"?> <GTK-Interface> <widget> <class>GtkWindow</class> <name>HelloWindow</name> <border_width>5</border_width> <Signal> <name>destroy</name> <handler>gtk_main_quit</handler> </Signal> <title>Hello</title> <type>GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL</type> <position>GTK_WIN_POS_NONE</position> <allow_shrink>True</allow_shrink> <allow_grow>True</allow_grow> <auto_shrink>False</auto_shrink> <widget> <class>GtkButton</class> <name>Hello World</name> <can_focus>True</can_focus> <Signal> <name>clicked</name> <handler>gtk_widget_destroy</handler> <object>HelloWindow</object> </Signal> <label>Hello World</label> </widget> </widget> </GTK-Interface>
A valid specification in Glade format implies a repertoire of actions by the GUI in response to user behavior. The Glade GUI treats these specifications as structured data files; Glade code generators, on the other hand, use them to write programs implementing a GUI. For some languages (including Python), there are runtime libraries that allow you to skip the code-generation step and simply instantiate the GUI directly at runtime from the XML specification (interpreting Glade markup, rather than compiling it to the host language). Thus, you get the choice of trading space efficiency for startup speed or vice versa.
Once you get past the verbosity of XML, Glade markup is a fairly simple language. It does just two things: declare GUI-widget hierarchies and associate properties with widgets. You don't actually have to know a lot about how glade works to read the specification above. In fact, if you have any experience programming in GUI toolkits, reading it will immediately give you a fairly good visualization of what glade does with the specification. (Hands up everyone who predicted that this particular specification will give you a single button widget in a window frame.)
This kind of transparency and simplicity is the mark of a good minilanguage design. The mapping between the notation and domain objects is very clear. The relationships between objects are expressed directly, rather than through name references or some other sort of indirection that you have to think to follow.
The ultimate functional test of a minilanguage like this one is simple: can I hack it without reading the manual? For a significant range of cases, the Glade answer is yes. For example, if you know the C-level constants that GTK uses to describe window-positioning hints, you'll recognize GTK_WIN_POS_NONE as one and instantly be able to change the positioning hint associated with this GUI.
The advantage of using Glade should be clear. It specializes in code generation so you don't have to. That's one less routine task you have to hand-code, and one fewer source of hand-coded bugs.
More information, including source code and documentation and links to sample applications, is available at the Glade project page. Glade has been ported to Windows.
