Re: Properties, what are they for? Wigets writing doubts.

[Edward Catmur <ed catmur co uk>]

On Thu, 2006-09-14 at 18:30 +0000, Alexandre wrote:
>   Hi everyone.
>
>   I'm beginning in widget's writing, and I want to know what is the
> purpose of the  widgets properties. Because, when I look at the gtk
> widgets, they  have a lot of properties, but this properties can be
> changed with the gtk_name_set.. functions too..
>   Like the frame, is has a "label" property to change it's label, but
> it can be done with the gtk_frame_set_label (or anything like it), so,
> why use properties?

gtk_frame_set_label() is a bare wrapper function for the set_property
call; it's a pure convenience method. The reason we use properties is
because it's OO; subclassed widgets can override the property accessors.

Also, it's useful for bindings; e.g. in pygtk <object>.props gives the
collection of the object's properties. Without the formalism of GObject
properties that wouldn't be possible.

Ed