While developing the GIMP
(GNU Image Manipulation Program) a few years back, Spencer Kimball and
Peter Mattis decided that it might be fun to write a user interface
toolkit to go along with it. And so they created GTK+ (the GIMP Toolkit)
– a library of “widgets” that makes it easier for developers to build
GUI-based application. A widget is one of the various components of a
graphical application; a toolbar, for example. The widgets provide
programmers with pre-built dialog boxes, windows, menu bars and other
GUI components. Having a pre-built foundation for these user interface
components greatly speeds development of GUI applications and also
enables applications built with those widgets to share a common “look
and feel”.
While developing the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) a few years back, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis decided that it might be fun to write a user interface toolkit to go along with it. And so they created GTK+ (the GIMP Toolkit) — a library of “widgets” that makes it easier for developers to build GUI-based application. A widget is one of the various components of a graphical application; a toolbar, for example. The widgets provide programmers with pre-built dialog boxes, windows, menu bars and other GUI components. Having a pre-built foundation for these user interface components greatly speeds development of GUI applications and also enables applications built with those widgets to share a common “look and feel”.
For those of us seeking a toolkit that does not restrict us to any one operating system or language, GTK+ is worth checking out.
While the GTK+ toolkit is written in C, there are language bindings available for a variety of languages including C++, Pascal, Guile, Perl, and Python. And the fact that the toolkit is released under an Open Source license makes de-bugging applications and learning about GTK+ easier than it would be with a proprietary toolkit.
GTK+ has been ported to a variety of platforms, including Solaris, HP-UX, MS Windows, and Irix, as well as Linux. It includes a library of routines (called GLIB) to support non-graphical elements required in an event-driven application such as linked lists, trees,sockets, and memory allocation to help make applications more portable.
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