Glade Interface Designer

Glade

Designing a preferences dialog in Glade
Original author(s)	Damon Chaplin
Developer(s)	GNOME Foundation
Initial release	18 April 1998 (1998-04-18)
Stable release	3.14.2 (GTK+ 3.0) 3.8.3 (GTK+ 2) (November 26, 2012 (2012-11-26) December 3, 2012 (2012-12-03)) [±]
Development status	Active
Operating system	Unix-like, Windows
Platform	Cross-platform
Available in	Multilingual
Type	GUI designer
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).

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-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 where 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.

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.

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	Languages	License
eglade	Daniel Elphick	Eiffel	Eiffel Forum License
Gladex	Christopher Pax and Charles Edward Pax	Perl, Python, Ruby	GPL v3
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)	GPL v3
Glade2FB	Arnel Borja	FreeBASIC	GPL v3
gate3	F. J. Fabien	Ada	MIT

See also

• wxGlade
• Rapid application development

External links

• Official website
• Binaries recent for Windows
• Binaries for OS X