Kitsap Peninsula Linux User's Group: Glade Tutorial
by Rikke Giles, Glade is written and maintained by Damon Chaplin
General Outline:
- Definitions
- Introduction
- Basic Glade Layout
- Using Glade for the First Time
- The Glade Menu Editor
- The Glade Properties Editor
- Glade Widgets in more Detail: Gtk+ Basic
- Glade Widgets in more Detail: Gtk+ Additional
- Glade Widgets in more Detail: Gnome
- After the Windows are Built
- Example: Geocenter
- In Callbacks.c: Linking the Handlers to the Backend in Geocenter
- FAQS
- Where to Find Help
- Authors
- glade: The gnome application development program. This program creates the 'window' system an application uses. It can be run in both gnome and KDE and there are different wrappers to produce applications in different coding languages. You can obtain Glade
here
- libglade: This is the library that comes with Glade. It includes some useful utilities for dealing with widgets. It also includes functions for dealing with xml files (glade files are in xml).
- gettext: This package and the utilities it includes are internationalization functions. It is not a required package for Glade, but it does allow an application to very easily use different languages.
- widget: one of the parts used in a windowing coding system (or audio system, etc). Widgets can be images, containers of images, text fields, lines, button bars, buttons, drawing windows, text entry windows, etc etc.
- signal: What a widget 'emits' on various different actions taken by the user. Clicking on a button creates a signal, so does entering text into a window, or opening a menu and so on. It is up to the coder to decide if the signal is significant or not.
- callback: The function that handles the signal. This is also called the handler.
- handler: The function that handles the signal. This is also called a callback.
Glade, written and maintained by Damon Chaplin, is a program designed to make building user interfaces for Gtk+ and Gnome simple and easy. What it doesn't do is provide a coding interface, you must use other programs to actually write the code that uses the windows, etc, Glade has built for you.
I am an experienced C programmer, but I had no experience with coding windowing systems when I started using glade. Through some hard work and copious reading of the help files, I have advanced to a point where using glade is simple, intuitive and even fun. I hope this tutorial will help you get familiar enough with using glade to allow you to enjoy it as well, and produce some quality applications with it.