Glade - a user interface builder

The Glade is a RAD^5.2 tool to enable quick and easy development of user interfaces for the GTK+ toolkit. It also contains built-in support for generating the C source code needed to recreate the interfaces.

The user interfaces designed in the Glade are stored in the well-known XML format, enabling easy integration with external tools. Several tools are already available which can turn the XML files into source code in other languages such as C++, Python, Ada95, Perl or Eiffel.

The Glade is mouse driven, intuitive and easy to use. It consists of three main windows: Project, Properties and Palette.

The Project window presents information about a project which is developed. It contains a list of all graphical windows involved. It also handles opening and saving project files and code generation as well.

The Palette window consists of all widgets which can be used during development process of a GUI.

The Properties window shows properties of the selected widget. There are information about the widget (a name, borders, a title, a type), placement and connected signal handlers (call-backs).

Besides this main three windows there are also the Widget Tree window, which presents hierarchy of widgets in the current project and the Clipboard which contains the last deleted widget.

Furthermore, using the Project window the user is able to see every created window exactly as it will look like after a compilation process.

Creating widgets is simple. First of all the user have to choose an appropriate widget from the Palette window. As a first one, usually the window widget is chosen. Adding other widgets to the created window is done by choosing them from the Palette window and pointing where they should appear in the window.

Entire GUI of the Osiris is written using the Glade. A sample session with the Glade during creation of the Osiris is shown in Fig 5.2. As can be seen there are visible Glade's windows: Project and Palette, Properties and Widget Tree below. There are two windows of the Osiris: the Controller's window and the Editor's window under development. In the Widget Tree window there is deployed widgets' structure of the Controller module.

Figure 5.2: Glade - Creating GUI of Osiris.