Graphical User Interface Programming

Catalog description

Course is based on the GTK+ library. GTK+ is a free, high-level library for creating graphical user interfaces that works on many UNIX-like platforms (including the Macintosh) and Windows®. It is released under the GNU Library General Public License, so that programs developed with it can be freely shared according to the terms of the license. The revised course introduced the general principles of window-based programming, including events and signals, widgets and windows, graphical concepts, asynchronous I/O, drag-and-drop, and more. Students will work on both the Windows and Linux platforms. GTK+ is built on top of the GDK library. The GDK library provides an interface, on UNIX platforms, to the underlying X-windows system. On Windows® platforms, the GDK provides the same functionality but does so via calls to the Win32 API. Therefore, GTK+ is shielded from the differences in the underlying platforms so that, for the most part, programs written against it can run on different platforms. This is not quite the case in practice, as there still are differences, and students in this class will learn them.