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Graphical Interface Development with Glade2

Author: Rikke D. Giles
Copyright: 2003, Rikke D. Giles
Glade is written by Damon Chaplin

• Introduction:
  • What is Glade?
  • Where to Get Glade?
  • How is Glade used?
  • What Glade can and cannot do
  • Basic Terminology
• A Quick Tour of Glade
  • The Glade Interface
    • The Main Window
    • The Palette Window
    • The Properties Window
    • The Widget Tree Window
  • The Files Glade Produces
    • When You Save a Project
    • When You Build a Project
• The GUI: Some Considerations
  • Design Decisions
  • Gnome Specific Design
  • KDE Specific Design
  • Consistency
  • Simplicity
• Example: GTemp
  • Objective
  • Creating the GUI
  • Setting up the First Window
  • Filling in the Main Application Window
  • Adding Subsequent Windows
  • Adding the Signals and Callbacks
• The Backend: Interconnecting with the GUI
  • Libraries and APIS
  • Referencing the Widgets
  • Loading or 'Calling Up' New Windows
  • Destroying Windows When They are No Longer Needed
  • What Next?
• Coding the Backend: Gtemp Redux
  • Compiling for the First Time
  • Making only One Window Open when the Program Starts
  • Making the X Icon in the Upper Righthand Corner of the Gtemp Main Window Work
  • Making the Quit Menuitem and the Quit Button Work
  • Making the About Window Load When the About Menuitem is Selected
  • Finally Making Gtemp Convert from One Temperature Scale to Another
  • At this Point, we have a Useable Application
  • Adding Error Notification
• The Widgets in More Detail
  • Gtk+ Basic Widgets
  • Gtk+ Container Widgets
  • Gtk+ Additional Widgets
  • Gnome Widgets
  • Deprecated Widgets
  • Widgets in Glade1 not in Glade2
• Summary and Resources
• Authors, Credits, Copyright

Introduction:

What is Glade?

Glade is a program designed to enable the quick building of graphical user interfaces for GTK+ and Gnome applications. However, it can be used with any desktop environment in linux, as long as the gtk+ and/or gnome libaries are installed.

Where to get Glade?

Glade can be downloaded from glade.gnome.org. It is also included with all the major distributions of Linux in various formats. The latest version of Glade, as of April 2003, is 1.1.3. It is supposed to be the last version before Glade 2.0.

How is Glade Used?

Glade is used in two ways:

• To create the GUI with Glade itself
• To load *.glade files (xml) with libglade and create the GUI on the fly

What Glade can and cannot do:

• Glade develops the GUI and associated code
• It creates empty callbacks and signal handlers to link the frontend GUI with the backend of the application
• Glade doesn't develop the 'backend' of your application
• Glade is not a complete IDE, in other words it does not include a compiler, editor or debugger. It is used in conjunction with these, for example with gvim as the editor, gcc as the compiler and gdb as the debugger. There are several IDEs for Linux that work with, or attempt to work with Glade. Anjuta is one.

Basic Terminology:

• Frontend/Gui: The graphical interface that a user sees and interacts with in a windowing environment. The 'eye candy'.
• Backend/Guts: The part of the application that actual does something, manipulates input from the user, provides output, does computations etc. By and large this part of the application should be completely invisible to the user.
• Widget: One of several or many elements used to build a window. It can be as simple as a label, or as complex as a multi-limbed data tree.
• Callback/Signal Handler/Signal: The widget will emit a 'signal' depending upon certain user actions (a mouse button press on the X in the upper right hand corner of the window, for example). The signal handler or callback is the function that responds to that signal. It is managed by gtk_main(). As a developer with Glade, all you have to do is tell that callback what to do if that signal is emitted. Note that this is not always as easy as it sounds.

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