Programmers on Perl and other languages can take advantage of the latest stable release of the GTK+ toolkit to facilitate rapid application development.
Many developers probably use GTK+ today, without realizing it. The toolkit began as part of the GNU Image Manipulation Program, affectionately known as The GIMP. GTK+ also has a place in the Gnome desktop as its foundation.
The CGI Directory news site posted an announcement of the release of GTK+ 2.10.0, the latest stable version released by the organization. It is free software, and licensed under terms of the Lesser General Public License, making it a more reasonable prospect for graphical user interface developers working on proprietary software.
GTK-Perl information may be obtained online at Sourceforge. It is recommended that Perl users interested in the GTK+ bindings join the mailing list or the IRC channel to ask questions of the authors.
The GTK project suggests using the Glade interface builder along with GTK+ to speed up those GUI development efforts using Perl and the new toolkit. GTK’s authors have noted they built the toolkit from the ground up to work with languages like Perl and Python as well as the usual C/C++ suspects.
GTK+ 2.10.0 adds some new features along with improving some others. Printing support includes a portable high-level API, along with a lower-level Unix-specific one; GTK supports cups and lpr.
The toolkit can store and display list of recently used files, stored in the format explained in the Desktop Bookmarks specification. There is also drag-and-drop support between GTK notebooks; new widgets and cell renderers; updates to the text view and entry widgets; and other changes.
Due to its strength as a toolkit, and free availability under LGPL terms, the GTK+ team believes its software offers a solid options for UI developers.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
