Glade Interface Designer Explained

Glade Interface Designer
Glade
Author:Damon Chaplin[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Developer:The GNOME Project
Released:[6]
Latest Release Version:3.40
Programming Language:C, XML
Operating System:Unix-like, Windows[7]
License:GNU General Public License

Glade Interface Designer is a graphical user interface builder for GTK, with additional components for GNOME. In its third version, Glade is programming language - independent, and does not produce code for events, but rather an XML file that is then used with an appropriate binding (such as GtkAda for use with the Ada programming language). See List of language bindings for GTK for the available ones.

Glade is free and open-source software distributed under the GNU General Public License.

History and development

The first Glade release, version 0.1, was made on 18 April 1998.

Glade 3 was released on 12 August 2006. According to the Glade Web site, the most noticeable differences for the end-user are:

Most of the difference is in the internals. Glade-3 is a complete rewrite, in order to take advantage of the new features of GTK+ 2 and the GObject system (Glade-3 was started when Glade-1 hadn't yet been ported to GTK+ 2). Therefore, the Glade-3 codebase is smaller and allows new interesting things, including:

On 5 April 2011, two parallel installable stable Glade versions[8] [9] [10] were released:

On 11 June 2015 Glade 3.19.0 was released. It depends at least on GTK+ 3.16.0. Among many bug fixes this version is the first to support the widgets GtkStack, GtkHeaderBar and GtkSidebar.[11]

GtkBuilder

GtkBuilder is the XML format that the Glade Interface Designer uses to save its forms. These documents can then be used in conjunction with the GtkBuilder object to instantiate the form using GTK. GladeXML is the XML format that was used with conjunction with libglade, which is now deprecated.[12]

Glade Interface Designer automatically generates all the source code for a graphical control element.

The "Gtk.Builder class" allows user interfaces to be designed without writing code.[13] The class describes the interface in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file and then loads the XML description at runtime and creating the objects automatically. The Glade Interface Designer allows creation of the user interface in a WYSIWYG manner. The description of the user interface is independent from the programming language being used.

Code sketching

Code sketchers are software applications that help a user create source code from a GladeXML file. Most code sketchers create source code which uses libglade and a GladeXML file to create the GUI. Some sketchers are able to create raw code that does not need the GladeXML file. The table below compares basic information about GladeXML code sketcher packages.

NameAuthorProgramming languagesSoftware license
eglade Daniel ElphickEiffelEiffel Forum License
GladexChristopher Pax and Charles Edward PaxPerl, Python, RubyGPLv3
glcBill AllenPythonLGPL
ruby-glade-create-template Masao MutohRuby
TepacheSandino Flores MorenoPythonLGPL
GladeToBacThomas FreiherrFreeBASIC (includes headers for GTK-3 andGTK-2.22.0 / GTKGlExt-1.2.0)GPLv3
Glade2FBArnel BorjaFreeBASICGPLv3
gate3F. J. FabienAdaMIT License

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. News: Rapid Application Development with Python and Glade ]. 1 July 2004 . David . Reed . Linux Journal . Damon Chaplin wrote the Glade program.
  2. Web site: Glade FAQ version 1.0 . 2000 . Damon . Chaplin.
  3. Book: Running Linux . 3rd . Matt . Welsh . Matthias . Kalle Dalheimer . Lar . Kaufman . August 1999. Appendix B The GNOME Project > B.5.3 Programming Tools > ..."Of particular interest is Damon Chaplin's Glade..."
  4. Web site: Damon Chaplin (author of the original Glade tool) . 2013-02-18 . bot: unknown . https://web.archive.org/web/20061103153407/http://www.gnomejournal.org/article/50/glade-3-sees-the-light-of-day . 3 November 2006.
  5. Web site: Historical Glade website . 2013-02-18 . bot: unknown . https://web.archive.org/web/19990423044329/http://glade.pn.org/ . 23 April 1999.
  6. Web site: GLADE GTK+ User Interface Builder > History > The first release, Version 0.1, was on 18. Apr 1998 . 2013-02-18 . bot: unknown . https://web.archive.org/web/19991008021612/http://glade.pn.org/history.html . 8 October 1999.
  7. Web site: Files · master · GNOME / Glade.
  8. Web site: [Glade-devel] Glade 3.10.0 Released]. dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20110606214843/http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/glade-devel/2011-April/001891.html . 6 June 2011 .
  9. http://glade.gnome.org/news.html Glade 3.8.0 and 3.10.0 released
  10. Web site: [Glade-devel] Glade 3.9.0 Released]. dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20110112181550/http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/glade-devel/2011-January/001858.html . 12 January 2011 .
  11. Web site: Glade 3.19.0 Released!. 12 June 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150614031300/http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/glade-devel/2015-June/002090.html. 14 June 2015. dead.
  12. Libglade officially deprecated in favor of GtkBuilder. . Gnome devel-announce-list . 11 May 2009 . 13 November 2010.
  13. Web site: Gtk 3.0 documentation on github.