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Glade Interface Designer is a graphical user interface creator for GTK+, with additional components for GNOME. Glade is programming language–independent, and by default it does not produce code for events, but rather an XML file, and optionally one or more C programming language files into which programmers insert their code. Glade's ability to directly output code is deprecated and will probably be absent in Glade-3.
Glade comes in two versions, one each for GTK+ 1 and 2. Glade is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License.
History and Future
The first Glade release, version 0.1, dates from April 18, 1998.
The latest Glade release is 2.12.1, from October 9, 2005.
Glade-3 is in the works. According to its website, the most noticeable differences for the end user are:
- Undo/Redo support in all operations.
- Support for multiple open projects.
- Removal of code generation.
Most of the difference will be in the internals. Glade-3 will be a complete rewrite, in order to take advantage from the new features of GTK+ 2 and the GObject sytem (Glade-3 was started when Glade-2 hadn't yet been ported to GTK+ 2). Therefore the Glade-3 codebase is smaller and allows new interesting things, including:
- Catalogs of widgets that are "pluggable". This means that external libraries can provide their set of widgets at runtime and Glade will detect them. As a matter of fact Glade-3 comes with standard GTK+ widgets only; Gnomeui and Gnome-db widgets will be provided separately.
- The various Glade Tools (palette, editor, etc) are implemented as widgets. This should allow easier integration in IDEs like Anjuta or Scaffold. This will also make it easier to change the Glade UI.
GladeXML
GladeXML is the XML format that the Glade Interface Designer uses to persist its forms. These documents can then be used in conjunction with the libglade library to instantiate the form using GTK+. Glade can also be configured to generate code directly that will generate the form, however this has been deprecated for some time.
External links
"Glade Interface Designer"