UI Developer Experience with Glade/GtkBuilder

This talk will start with a brief history of user interface development paradigms with GTK+ over the years. We will outline some of the breakthroughs which have accelerated and simplified user interface development over the past decade such as the creation of the original Glade tool with code generation, the creation of libglade and the integration of GtkBuilder into GTK+.

A presentation of some of the RAD tools available in competing software ecosystems will follow. Tools such as Adobe Flash combined with Action Script 3 and the Interface Builder combined with the NextStep environment in Objective C serve as a great example to demonstrate the gap which needs to be bridged in order to truly offer competitive free and open source software alternatives in user interface development paradigms and RAD tools.

Next, an explanation of Composite Widget Templates will be presented along with a vision of how we can achieve RAD tooling in GNOME that is more competitive with other leading software ecosystems.

The talk will end with a demonstration of Rapid Application Development with Glade and the Vala programming language, perhaps also JavaScript if integration of Composite Widget Templates is ready in JavaScript bindings on time.

Whatever time remains will be dedicated to Q&A and some group discussion on how we can improve the user interface developer experience further.

Save the date!
Friday, August 2nd
11:35 – 12:20