[Glade-devel] Glade3

[taf2 lehigh edu (todd)]

Hi,
        I'm working on a project that is very dependent on the xml generated by 
glade. We're actually building a whole description language on top of 
the glade format so that we can more easily bind sql data to our 
gtkwidgets.  Basically, it looks something like the following:

<app glade="myapp.glade">
        <widget id="person_combo">
                <!-- these data properties represent things you might
                        store in a GObject via g_object_s/get_data -->
                <data id="person_id" type="int"/>
                <data id="person_name" type="string" visible="yes"/>
        </widget>

        <datalink repeat="0"> <!-- whether a timeout should activate the
                                        sql -->
                <sql>
                        select person_id, person_name from persondb
                        <map sql_id="person_id"
                                widget="person_combo"
                                id="person_id"/>
                        <map sql_id="person_name"
                                widget="person_combo"
                                id="person_name"/>
                </sql>
        </datalink>
        
        <!-- this file could get very large -->
</app>

My thinking is the following.  Its painful to write xml :)  it would
be really cool to add a plugin system for glade3 so that we could
build in some sort of tool to aid us in constructing the above xml
since it is already so dependent on the widgets in the included
glade file.  I'm sure there are other people with ideas about how
to better integrate with the libglade/glade functionality.  I think
if it is possible to expose an api for a plugin inteface in the
next version of glade it would be tremdenously helpful to me and 
probably others who would be interested in expanding the possiblities
of glade :)

just some thoughts i wanted to share and get feed back on.  Hopefully,
i'm not totally lost and missed something in all this ;)

-todd