Glade Interface Designer

Glade

Designing a preferences dialog in Glade
Original author(s)	Damon Chaplin[1][2][3][4][5]
Developer(s)	The GNOME Project
Initial release	18 April 1998[6]
Stable release	3.20.0 (for GTK+ 3.x) 3.8.5 (for GTK+ 2.x) (22 March 2016[7] 12 May 2014[8]) [±]
Repository	github.com/GNOME/glade
Development status	Active
Written in	C, XML
Operating system	Unix-like, Windows[9]
Type	GUI builder Linux on the desktop Human interface guidelines
License	GNU General Public License
Website	glade.gnome.org

Glade Interface Designer is a graphical user interface builder for GTK+, with additional components for GNOME. In its third version, Glade is programming language–independent, and does not produce code for events, but rather an XML file that is then used with an appropriate binding (such as GtkAda for use with the Ada programming language). See List of language bindings for GTK+ for the available ones.

Glade is free and open-source software distributed under the GNU General Public License.

History and development

The first Glade release, version 0.1, was made on 18 April 1998.^[6]

Glade 3 was released on 12 August 2006. According to the Glade Web site, the most noticeable differences for the end-user are:

• Undo and redo support in all operations.
• Support for multiple open projects.
• Removal of code generation.
• Contextual help system with Devhelp

Most of the difference is in the internals. Glade-3 is a complete rewrite, in order to take advantage of the new features of GTK+ 2 and the GObject system (Glade-3 was started when Glade-1 hadn't yet been ported to GTK+ 2). Therefore, the Glade-3 codebase is smaller and allows new interesting things, including:

• Catalogs of "pluggable" widgets. This means that external libraries can provide their set of widgets at runtime and Glade will detect them. In fact, Glade 3 supports only standard GTK+ widgets; GNOME UI and DB widgets are provided separately.
• The various Glade Tools (palette, editor, etc.) are implemented as widgets. This allows for easier integration in IDEs like Anjuta, and makes it easier to change the Glade UI.

On 5 April 2011, two parallel installable stable Glade versions^[10][11][12] were released:

• Glade 3.8: That includes all support for GTK+ up till version 2.24. This version is to serve as a decent migration path for older projects migrating to GTK+ 3.0.
• Glade 3.10: That includes support only for widgets that are still included in GTK+ 3.0 and additionally drops support for Libglade.

On 11 June 2015 Glade 3.19.0 was released. It depends at least on GTK+ 3.16.0. Among many bug fixes this version is the first to support the widgets GtkStack, GtkHeaderBar and GtkSidebar.^[13]

GtkBuilder

GtkBuilder is the XML format that the Glade Interface Designer uses to save its forms. These documents can then be used in conjunction with the GtkBuilder object to instantiate the form using GTK+. GladeXML is the XML format that was used with conjunction with libglade, which is now deprecated.^[14]

Glade Interface Designer automatically generates all the source code for a graphical control element.

The "Gtk.Builder class" allows user interfaces to be designed without writing code.^[15] The class describes the interface in an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file and then loads the XML description at runtime and creating the objects automatically. The Glade Interface Designer allows creation of the user interface in a WYSIWYG manner. The description of the user interface is independent from the programming language being used.

Code sketching

Code sketchers are software applications that help a user create source code from a GladeXML file. Most code sketchers create source code which uses libglade and a GladeXML file to create the GUI. Some sketchers are able to create raw code that does not need the GladeXML file. The table below compares basic information about GladeXML code sketcher packages.

Name	Author	Programming languages	Software license
eglade	Daniel Elphick	Eiffel	Eiffel Forum License
Gladex	Christopher Pax and Charles Edward Pax	Perl, Python, Ruby	GPLv3
glc	Bill Allen	Python	LGPL
ruby-glade-create-template	Masao Mutoh	Ruby
Tepache	Sandino Flores Moreno	Python	LGPL
GladeToBac	Thomas Freiherr	FreeBASIC (includes headers for GTK-3 and GTK-2.22.0 / GTKGlExt-1.2.0)	GPLv3
Glade2FB	Arnel Borja	FreeBASIC	GPLv3
gate3	F. J. Fabien	Ada	MIT License

See also

• wxGlade
• Qt Designer

References

1. Reed, David (1 July 2004). "Rapid Application Development with Python and Glade]". Linux Journal. Damon Chaplin wrote the Glade program
2. Chaplin, Damon (2000). "Glade FAQ version 1.0".
3. Welsh, Matt; Kalle Dalheimer, Matthias; Kaufman, Lar (August 1999). Running Linux (3rd ed.). Appendix B The GNOME Project > B.5.3 Programming Tools > ..."Of particular interest is Damon Chaplin's Glade..."
4. Damon Chaplin (author of the original Glade tool) at the Wayback Machine (archived 3 November 2006)
5. Historical Glade website at the Wayback Machine (archived 23 April 1999)
6. GLADE GTK+ User Interface Builder > History > The first release, Version 0.1, was on 18. Apr 1998 at the Wayback Machine (archived 8 October 1999)
7. "Glade 3.20.0 Released!". Retrieved 24 March 2016.
8. http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/glade-devel/2014-May/002063.html
9. http://git.gnome.org/browse/glade/tree/build/mswindows/README
10. http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/glade-devel/2011-April/001891.html
11. Glade 3.8.0 and 3.10.0 released, Tuesday 5 April 2011 by Tristan Van Berkom - Glade 3.8.0 and 3.10.0 are now available for download. 3.8 is the last stable series of Glade for GTK+2 and 3.10 is the first stable series for GTK+3
12. http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/glade-devel/2011-January/001858.html
13. "Glade 3.19.0 Released!". Retrieved 12 June 2015.
14. "Libglade officially deprecated in favor of GtkBuilder.". Gnome devel-announce-list (Mailing list). 11 May 2009. Retrieved 13 November 2010.
15. "Gtk 3.0 documentation on github".

External links

• Official website
• Binaries recent for Windows on SourceForge.net
• Binaries for OS X