GUI Builders

In the previous example, you have created the user-interface for the application by calling the create functions for each widget and placing it where you wanted it. However, this can be quite burdensome for more complex applications. Many programming environments, including GNOME, have programs called GUI builders that can be used to automatically create your GUI for you. You just have to write the code for the signal handlers and for initializing your program. The main GUI builder for GNOME applications is called GLADE. GLADE ships with most Linux distributions.

There are GUI builders for most programming environments. Borland has a range of tools that will build GUIs quickly and easily on Linux and Win32 systems. The KDE environment has a tool called QT Designer which helps you automatically develop the GUI for their system.

There is a broad range of choices for developing graphical applications, but hopefully this appendix gave you a taste of what GUI programming is like.