Re: gtk2 or glade?

[muppet <scott asofyet org>]

On Sep 25, 2004, at 8:56 AM, David Alcobero wrote:

> But, in glade you can put the signals, the position of the widgets, 
> the positions of the windows, the widgets and all.  And you only 
> should put the code that you want to do the signal of the widgets, and 
> this isn't glade, is (in this case) perl code, not gtk2 code. So it's 
> worth learning gtk2 if glade generate all code for you? This is the 
> question that i should said.

even if glade builds the whole gui for you and connects a bunch of 
callbacks, you still have to understand the gtk+ API in order to know 
what to do in those callbacks.  for example, if you want to ask the 
user for confirmation before letting a window manager close a window, 
you have to understand that the window manager sends the 
"delete-event", that the default handler for "delete-event" calls 
gtk_widget_destroy(), and that the way to inhibit that is to connect a 
handler that returns true to stop propagation.  glade can't do *all* of 
that for you, and doesn't tell you why.

glade also doesn't set up GtkTreeView or GtkTextView widgets for you, 
so you'll still have to understand how to use callbacks and signals and 
all of that.
http://scentric.net/tutorial/sec-misc-glade.html

if you want to use custom widgets, you also have a fair amount of work 
to do, and glade doesn't make that much easier.


also, to reiterate, you don't want to use glade to generate code; you 
want to use libglade (via Gtk2::GladeXML) to load the glade-generated 
xml file at runtime and build the gui for you.  code generation is not 
a good idea.  (the tutorial link above includes a link to a mailing 
list message which explains further.)

so, my answer stands, yes, you still need to learn gtk+/Gtk2 in order 
to get the most out of glade.



--
The door is locked.  I tried to open it, but the lock is harder to pick 
than a broken nose.
  -- Sensei, on 'I, Ninja'