Glade Interface Designer

Infobox Software
name = Glade



caption = Designing a preferences dialog in Glade
released = April 18, 1998
latest_release_version = 3.4.5
latest_release_date = release date and age|2008|5|5
latest_preview_version = 3.5.2
latest_preview_date = release date and age|2008|4|9
operating_system = Cross-platform
status = Active
genre = GUI designer
license = GPL
website = http://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).

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.

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.
* 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-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.

GladeXML

GladeXML is the XML format that the Glade Interface Designer uses to save its forms. These documents can then be used in conjunction with the libglade library to instantiate the form using GTK+.

Mockups

Glade can be used to design GUI program mockups.

Other GTK+ designers

Glade is one of several applications that allow a user to graphically create a GUI application. Applications specific to GTK+ are
* [http://crow-designer.sourceforge.net/ Crow Designer] (no longer under active development)
* [http://enveria.sourceforge.net/ Enveria Development IDE]
* [http://gazpacho.sicem.biz/ Gazpacho]
* [http://www.roebling.de/ wxDesigner]

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.

External links

* [http://glade.gnome.org/ Glade home page]
* [http://glade.gnome.org/apps.html Glade Example Applications]