Re: HIG and Escape

[Ian Britten <britten caris com>]

On Sun, 09 Mar 2003 21:01:01 -0600
Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu> wrote:

> As for Glade-ifying, doesn't that require that we depend on libglade?

Excuse me for jumping into the middle of your conversation, but I think I
can clear up a (common) confusion (Assuming I understand what you're
discussing...)

'Glade' and 'libglade' are separate, but related, packages.  Glade is the
GUI builder application.  It lays out your dialogs (Very easy - Highly
recommended), and has no dependency on libglade.
Glade saves it's information in a .glade (XML) file, and from this XML
description, the application can generate your compilable code (C/C++/etc)
for your dialog.

'libglade' is a tool/library that can be used to instantiate a UI directly
from Glades XML file, at run-time.  It doesn't need your UI to be compiled.
The big benefit of libglade is that you can change the XML file (some),
altering labels, constraints, etc, and you simply re-run the application
and your changes will immediately be apparent (No recompiling).

We had initially used libglade, but we found it didn't work on Windows
(Several years ago - dunno now), and we also found it hard to use in a
development environment where everyone had multiple checkouts, branched
versions, shared applications, etc - Getting each app to find it's correct
.glade file (at startup) required care.
Distribution/installation requires that the .glade file be shipped, and
that it can be found when the application starts.  There may be
standardized techniques for this now, but there weren't before...

Hope this enlightens someone!
Ian