Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 15:03:58 +0200
From: Benjamin Monate <Benjamin.Monate at lri.fr>
To: lablgtk at kaba.or.jp
Subject: Re: Glade support
Message-Id: <20010517150358.53e582fb.Benjamin.Monate at lri.fr>
In-Reply-To: <20010516192110D.garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp>
References: <20010516033039.18228.cpmta at c012.sfo.cp.net>
	<20010516192110D.garrigue@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp>
Organization: LRI
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Hello,

Here is my personal opinion about the callbacks and glade.

> >  It is not so clear to me that a Glade GUI builder is so easy to deal
with
> > for beginners. My experience with Glade is that was very easy to pack
> > widgets and in a few minutes got a form. But dealing with callbacks is
a very
> > different story.
> 
> This is very true. For callbacks, you have to see examples.
> I hope that lablgtk+ocamlbrowser makes it easier to find the available
> callbacks, but you still have to choose the right one.

In Glade you have the list of all possibles events related to a given
widget.
While you design the interface in glade you can add handlers for many
messages. If there is a generic stub 
generated for those, you will quickly learn what is called when without
having to dive into the gtk internals.
Here mlglade helps a lot the beginners.
The development process becomes : 
1) Visually design in glade
2) Choose what messages you want to answer in glade
3) Test your empty application to understand if the callbacks are
registered to the proper events
4) Customize the callbacks with your own code
5) Go back to 1 or 2 or stop
If you are a gtk expert you can add later other callbacks to the widgets,
but this is not compulsary.

> > Also Glade as it was designed to be used with C (in spite its
> > portable XML output) is much more low level than LablGtk, and I
> > don't know if this XML output is suited to build a high level
> > callback interface (it seems me not) 'a la par' of LablGtk.
> 
> That's why my point of view is that you don't really want to do the
> callbacks with glade, just the layout, and that you want to be able to
> change your layout easily (no code merging), at least during
> development. 

I agree that code merging was a bad idea. 
But having a class of default callbacks that you can overide by
inheritance is much prettier and 
interacts softly with changes of the layout, doesn't it ?

-- 
| Benjamin Monate         | mailto:Benjamin.Monate@lri.fr |
| LRI - Bât. 490          | http://www.lri.fr/~monate/    |
| Université de Paris-Sud | phoneto: +33 1 69 15 42 32    |
| F-91405 ORSAY Cedex     | faxto: +33 1 69 15 65 86      |