Graphical User Interfaces

• Required text: Beginning GTK+ and GNOME
• • Author: Peter Wright
  • Publisher: Wrox Press Inc;
  • ISBN: 1861003811
  • Bookpool web page for purchasing this book

Prerequisites: Some knowledge of C++ and object oriented programming.

• Linux (which can be inexpensively purchased from Cheapbytes),
• or the Unix simulation system for Windows (with an X server).
• GTK (but no Gnome) and Gimp for Windows

Important links

• Gnome canvas prog discussed in class
• Gtk+ Tutorial
• Gnome Home Page
• Gnome Developer's Site (with documentation, libraries of new widgets, etc.)
• Gtk Home Page
• Text on Gtk/Gnome by Havok Pennington
• Glade Home Page
• Orbit Home Page
• Orbit Beginner's Guide
• Gtk-- Tutorial
  Gtk-- is a set of C++ bindings for Gtk/Gnome.
• Inti Home Page
  Inti is another (better) set of C++ bindings for Gtk/Gnome
• Tutorial on using Gnome with Perl
• GTK Perl tutorial

Goals of this course:
To teach the student:

1. Design issues involved in developing GUI programs
2. High-level rapid prototyping languages for GUI development.
3. Assembling the components of a GUI project.

Course outline

1. Introduction to the course.
2. General concepts of GUI programming
   • Event-driven programming. Main event loop.
   • Windowing systems. API's.
   • X-Windows.How to use X-Windows.
     • Raw X-windows programs (not a pretty sight!)
     • Running X-Windows from home.
     • Running Gnome under Windows
   • GUI API's for X-Windows. The need for them. Widgets.
   • GTK+ and Gimp.
   • Signal-driven GUI programming.
     1. A simple GTK+ program.
     2. A hello-world program for GTK+.
3. Using the Gnome Desktop (Most people running Linux will not need this).
4. Basic GTK+ widgets
   • Label widget
   • Callback functions: gtk_signal_connect
   • Button widget
5. Geometry management
   • Packing boxes

Perl/Tk API

1. Introduction to the Perl language
   1. Basic Perl data types
   2. Scalar vs composite data: arrays and hashes
   3. Coding Perl functions
   4. References.
      • Current documentation for Perl/Tk
      • Source code of a database application
      • source code for a Text-based application
2. Object-oriented programming in Perl
   1. Packages and classes
   2. Constructor functions in Perl. User-defined storage layout.
   3. Class methods vs Instance Methods
   4. Perl garbage collection.
3. Perl/TK
   1. Basic widgets: MainWindow and Label. Mainloop.
   2. Geometry management: the pack method.
4. References in Perl: use of prefix to dereference.
   1. Complex literal data structures.
   2. Multiple ways of dereferencing.
5. Buttons in Perl/Tk.
   1. Check buttons, radio buttons
   2. Variable references, sharing a variable
6. Geometry management: the grid widget.
7. The Entry widget
   1. Retrieving user input from an entry widget
   2. Index-strings --- an introduction to the Text widget.
   3. Second assignment: desk calculator.
8. The Text widget
   1. Options for creating
   2. Index strings
   3. Editing text.
   4. Inserting pictures and other widgets into the Text widget.
9. Object-oriented design techniques.
   1. Third assignment: simple spreadsheet program.
10. The Canvas widget.
    1. Tags and groups of items.
    2. General graphical operations.
    3. Item attributes.
11. Background on Term project: parsing and scanning text in Perl.
12. Concurrency in Perl/Tk: cooperative verses preemptive multitasking.
    1. Use of the update method.
    2. Unblocking CPU intensive phases of a GUI program.

Other GUI design systems

1. the Qt library
2. wxWindows
3. GUI applications in Python.

Software

• Perl Manual
• Using Perl on departmental systems and installing it on home systems
• Perl/Tk page (for windows)

• Inexpensive X-server for Windows

• Another X-server for Windows
• X Client libraries for Windows (so you can develop X Applications on a Windows platform)
• PowerZip Home Page --- a free utility for Win-95/98/NT for untarring and unzipping files

1. wxWindows
2. Troll Tech and the Qt widget set
   Note: the free version is only available for Unix platforms.
   • Qt documentation (html)
     Qt documentation (gzipped pdf --- ungzipped version is 8 meg)
   • Programs used in the tutorial
   • Interface builder for Qt
   • TMake --- a tool for building makefiles for Qt applications
   • TMake documentation
3. TK/TCL
4. Lesstif (a free Motif clone)
   Lesstif documentation
5. KDE --- a complete (free) Unix desktop system written using Qt
6. Amaya --- experimental web browser built using Lesstif
7. GnuStep (an Objective-C GUI development system based on the Next machine)

---

Justin R. Smith

Last modified: Mon Aug 13 12:58:57 EDT 2001