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Glade is a graphical user interface (GUI) builder for creating applications using the GTK+ 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, can be used to dynamically create the user interface directly from the XML data at run time.
As with many Gnome products Glade's native save format is 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 that allow differently structured C source code to be generated directly from the XML data, for example, exist.
In this chapter we begin with an overview of 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.
