GtkBuilder has landed!

June 15, 2007 8:54 pm johan Blogroll, GNOME, General, olpc

Today, after more than 2 years and 120 comments I could finally close #172535, adding support for loading interfaces created by UI designers in Gtk+.

GtkBuilder replaces libglade, it uses a similar XML format but also supports the following:

  • GtkTreeViews including columns and cell renderers
  • Menus and toolbars created using GtkUIManager, including actions & actiongroups.
  • TreeModels, it’s possible to define the data used by treemodels. It’s used by treeviews, iconviews, comboboxes, and entries.
  • SizeGroups, align all these widgets without using tables!

I’d like to especially thank Matthias Clasen for reviewing the beast, it was over 6500 lines in the end! Henrique Romano helped me to implement parts of it and Tristan Van Berkom, Tim Janik, Kalle Vahlman, Christian Perch, Dan Winship, Owen Taylor, Behdad Esfahbod and Havoc Pennington also helped out with suggestions and improvements to the patch.There are a couple of things that needs to be done to simplify the transition from libglade to gtkbuilder though:

  • Add support in UI designers. Gazpacho mostly supports it already, it’ll be easy to fix. glade-2 is out of the question and I expect glade-3 to at least partially support GtkBuilder before GNOME 2.20 is released
  • Improve migration from libglade files. There’s a script in bugzilla which converts old libglade files to files which gtkbuilder can load. It needs to be improved and tested, especially menus and toolbars
  • Some libglade features are not supported yet, such as loading only a part of a glade file and pixbuf properties. These will be fixed before the final Gtk+ 2.12 release

Now, time to party!

15 Responses

  1. mike Says:
    June 15th, 2007 at 21:25

    This really sound great!

    > I expect glade-3 to at least partially support GtkBuilder before GNOME 2.18 is released
    you mean 2.20, don’t you?

  2. johan Says:
    June 15th, 2007 at 21:34

    mike: yeah, my mistake, updated to 2.20, thanks!

  3. GtkBuilder has landed! | Pilka Says:
    June 15th, 2007 at 22:18

    [...] Visit Source [...]

  4. pclouds Says:
    June 15th, 2007 at 23:32

    Finally. Congratulations! I’m now waiting for gtkbuilder support from glade-3.

  5. claudio Says:
    June 16th, 2007 at 01:25

    This is awesome news Johan! congratulations and thanks for the good work!

  6. Christopher Armstrong Says:
    June 16th, 2007 at 02:52

    Congratulations, Johan. Thanks for the hard work.

  7. jdub Says:
    June 16th, 2007 at 05:08

    Congratulations! Woohoo! :-)

  8. Philip Withnall Says:
    June 16th, 2007 at 11:44

    Congratulations, and good work!

  9. bersace Says:
    June 16th, 2007 at 13:08

    You rock so much ! Thank you !

  10. Sri Ramkrishna Says:
    June 16th, 2007 at 14:51

    Congratulations, dude! You rock! You deserve all the accolades you can get :)

    sri

  11. Lorenzo Gil Sánchez Says:
    June 17th, 2007 at 10:36

    Finally! Good job Johan. I’ve been waiting for this for a looooong time :-)

  12. Hongli Lai Says:
    June 17th, 2007 at 10:59

    Why does GtkBuilder exist? What exactly is wrong with libglade?

  13. Murray Cumming Says:
    June 24th, 2007 at 10:03

    Where is this glade->gtkbuilder conversion script?

  14. johan Says:
    June 24th, 2007 at 12:46

    Murray: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=447995

  15. Tristan’s World » Blog Archive » Long time no blog Says:
    July 4th, 2007 at 11:56

    [...] you all know from Johan’s recent post the infamous builder is on the rise, this means people will be desiring UI designers to produce UI [...]