Re: Question about Glade vs no Glade

[muppet <scott asofyet org>]

On Friday, June 11, 2004, at 12:28 AM, Glen Gibson wrote:

> What is more resource intensive?  A gtk2-perl script that uses Glade 
> to build the GUI or just coding the GUI in the gtk2-perl script?

that depends on what resources you're talking about.

for machine resources, it's debatable whether the extra library and 
parsing involved in libglade is more work than the perl parsing and 
marshaling to do the same work in hand-coded perl.  in the end, both 
hand-coded guis and libglade-created guis run at the same speed (faster 
than a human), so that's not an issue.

however, the simple fact is that in 90% of cases, using libglade will 
save you a ton of work, and programmer time is more important than 
machine time[1].

if you have a complex dynamic UI that is difficult to draw in glade 
(e.g. widgets exist or not depending on some other criteria) or you are 
creating a widget or you can't afford the extra dependency, then you 
need to hand-code things[2].  in all other cases, simple-to-medium 
applications, glade can save you a lot of time and work.

it can never hurt you to know how to create by hand what glade does for 
you.  in fact, not knowing what glade is doing can turn Gtk2::GladeXML 
into a magic box, which in turn makes your debugging more painful when 
something goes awry.





> Trying to decide if it's about time I learnt to build gtk2-perl apps 
> using Glade for building the UI, leaving more time to write the stuff 
> that does important things in the background.

i think you answered your own question.



[1] the exception is when an extra hour of programmer time can result 
in an optimization that saves a lot of time and/or money over a large 
amount of time.  this is rarely the case in user-interface programming, 
more true for algorithms and data processing.

[2] those, and the fact that i deal with lots of custom widgets for 
which i have never written glade interface modules, are pretty much the 
reasons i don't use glade myself...  though i've flirted with it many 
times.

--
Walk softly, and carry a BFG-9000.
  -- unknown