Glade Interface Designer

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Glade

Glade designing a fictional web browser
Developer:	Damon Chaplin
Latest release:	3.1.1 / 4 December 2006
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	GUI designer
License:	GPL
Website:	glade.gnome.org

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 is absent in Glade-3.

Glade comes in three versions, one for GTK+ 1 and two for GTK+ 2. Glade is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License.

[edit] History and development

The first Glade release, version 0.1, was made on April 18, 1998.

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.

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-2 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 or Scaffold, and makes it easier to change the Glade UI.

[edit] 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.