Re: Glade vs Hand code



On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 19:32 +0100, David Nečas (Yeti) wrote:
> So, an opposite opinion:
> simple-minded, static interface => glade is good
> complex, dynamic, data-driven => glade is an obstacle

I would agree with David here.

I find that I've been through a few iterations of "like Glade, hate
Glade".

At first, I thought it was brilliant. Certainly the fact that you can
easily set tons of properties, etc, was just the cat's meow.

Then, as I started building up more complex and especially dynamic user
interface elements, I found Glade was getting in the way. Too much
trouble. One big pain is naming the widgets in Glade and then ensuring
that the widgets you lookup code side match. Really messes you over when
you do refactorings (which, working in java-gnome as I do, is something
one does A LOT via the wonders of Eclipse et al)

[at that point, however, I'd actually settled on some programming
conventions whereby it is transparent whether an application window is
code derived or glade derived. The wonders of subclassing. So, now, it
doesn't really make any difference which I do]

So then in a new application I decided "well, forget Glade" and started
doing everything programmatically. And then I realized that I was having
to deal with coming up with variable names for each and every bloody
Label, and that was a real pain in the ass.

So the conclusion I settled on was to use Glade for as much scaffolding
as possible, thus saving the object pressure of proxies being created
for not much at all, but not to try and do anything even remotely
complicated in Glade, preferring to hand off and switch to code at that
point.

And, no doubt, I'll be of a different opinion next month. :-)

AfC
Sydney

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Andrew Frederick Cowie
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