Book Image

GNOME 3 Application Development Beginner's Guide

By : Mohammad Anwari
Book Image

GNOME 3 Application Development Beginner's Guide

By: Mohammad Anwari

Overview of this book

<p>GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. GNOME 3 provides both modern desktops and development platforms with more than 50 supported languages of the world. Since 1999, it has been evolving into a very nice desktop to use and an interesting platform to develop on. <br /><br />"GNOME 3 Application Development Beginner's Guide" is about developing GNOME 3 application with Vala and JavaScript programming languages. It guides the reader to build Gtk+, Clutter, and HTML5 applications on the GNOME 3 platform. It covers GNOME 3 specific subsystems such as data access, multimedia, networking, and filesystem. It also covers good software engineering practices such as localization and testing.<br /><br />This book is full of step-by-step tutorials and ready to run codes. The examples are written in a simple and straightforward way&nbsp; to make it easier for the reader to get a thorough understanding of the topics.<br /><br />The book starts with the installation of GNOME 3 and ends with building two exciting projects, a web browser and a Twitter client. The book starts from the basics and gradually talks about more advanced topics.<br /><br />It then guides the readers in using the development environment starts from Anjuta IDE, Glade, and DevHelp. The essential GNOME 3 subsystems like GStreamer, GLib, GIO, GSettings, Evolutions Data Server, WebKit, and GNOME desktop are then uncovered one by one. Then the internationalization, localization, and unit testing techniques are brought up.<br /><br />"GNOME 3 Application Development Beginner's Guide" is really a guide that a novice GNOME 3 application developer must not miss.</p>
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
GNOME 3 Application Development Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – designing our UI


Now let's fire up Anjuta and design our UI. A Glade designer does not have GtkWebUI in its palette, so here is what we are going to do:

  1. Create a new Vala project and call it web-browser. Use GtkBuilder for the UI.

  2. Open web_browser.ui with Glade designer by just double-clicking the file in the Project dock.

  3. Put a vertical Box object in the window with two items.

  4. Put another Box object, this time a horizontal one, on the top part of the vertical Box object, leaving the bottom part empty. Split the horizontal Box object into five elements by filling the Number of elements option with 5.

  5. Put a button on each empty box element, except the third one. On each button, activate the Stock button option and fill it with gtk-go-back, gtk-go-forward, gtk-refresh, and gtk-ok stock buttons on each button respectively.

  6. Give the buttons names, use btn_back, btn_forward, btn_refresh, and btn_go. Put the name in each Name option of the button.

  7. Put an Entry object on the third...