Re: libglade vs glade for dialog generation

[Todd Fisher <toddf simosoftware com>]

Tristan Van Berkom wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 17:25:59 +0000, Tim Müller <zen18864 zen co uk> wrote:
>  
>
> > On Wednesday 19 January 2005 12:37, Gus Koppel wrote:
> >
> > Hi Gus,
> >
> >    
> >
> > > > Note also that the new generation of glade will not
> > > > generate code at all.
> > > >        
> > > Actually, to me that sounds like a threat, which may jeopardize not only
> > > my but also other people's future work or plans with GTK+!
> > >      
>
> Hmmm, alot can happen when you take a day off ;-)
>
>    As some have already mentioned, people are welcome to write code
> generation scripts/etc based on glade files, the work-load involved in
> maintaining code-generation as a feature of glade has a major impact
> on development velocity, which is something to take seriously as specialy
> in the open source world.
>
> The absence of code generation, and other aspects (such as making extensive 
> use of object introspection) are essential to the survival of glade-3
> in the long
> run IMO.
>
> Cheers,
>                                                            -Tristan
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>  
Seems to me a plugin system for code generation is the way to go.  That 
way the glade developers don't have to be slowed down by ensuring the 
code generation is working.  It also means potentially more languages 
can be supported for code generation.  I would suspect there would be an 
upfront cost in designing a comprehensive interface for a code 
generation plugin API, in terms of glade developer cycles.  But once the 
API is set in stone other projects can be started that focus only on the 
task of generating code from a .glade file, for whatever language the 
project desires and of course is supported.   In this way we get the 
best of both worlds.  I know I learned gtk+ by studying the C code 
generated by glade, but have found libglade a much faster method for 
developing applications, with a acceptable amount of overhead, for added 
benefit in code clarity (just my opinion).

-todd