Running Linux, Third Edition

GNOME as a Development Platform

While GNOME can certainly make Unix-based operating systems more palatable to ordinary users, the GNOME team devotes a lot of energy to making GNOME fun to hack on, too.

From the developer’s perspective, GNOME is made up of a set of core libraries, an infrastructure for component programming, and a set of reusable language-neutral components.

The GNOME Foundation Libraries

Many powerful features work across all GNOME applications in a standardized way, thanks to these libraries.

GTK+ (GIMP toolkit)

GTK+ is GNOME’s object oriented graphics toolkit. It was originally designed by the GIMP programmers to simplify their work in building the GIMP. GTK+ was chosen for GNOME primarily because it implemented an object system rich in functionality and it already had interface bindings for a wide range of programming languages. This meant that GTK+ already went a long way towards achieving GNOME’s goal of programming language neutrality. For more information, see http://www.gtk.org.

Guidelines have been developed that specify the method for adding new language bindings (wrappers) for the GTK+/GNOME libraries. Developers following these guidelines have contributed support for a number of languages, including C++, Objective-C, TOM, PERL, Python, GUILE, ADA, and others. Other bindings are in various stages of development, which is understandable, considering the large number of libraries that make up GNOME.

GTK+’s object system is very elegant in its design and allows ...