Quickly applications rely on XML formatted files to describe their UI elements. These files can be parsed using Glade. It turns out that the java-gnome supports parsing glade files too; and the griffon-gtk plugin relies on java-gnome to do its thing. I think you can guess where this conversation is headed
If you have an Ubuntu distro on your machine you can install Quickly by issuing the following command
$ sudo apt-get install quickly
Once you have Quickly installed you create a basic project with the following commands:
$ quickly create ubuntu-project foo $ cd foo
If you inspect the contents of foo/data/ui you'll find all the UI definitions that can be parsed at bootstrap in order to construct the application's user interface. We're ready to build a Griffon application that will have the same user interface. The first step would be to create a Griffon application project.
$ griffon create-app quick
Now we copy all media files to the application's resource directory
$ copy $FOO_HOME/data/media/* quick/griffon-app/resources
Where $FOO_HOME points to the directory that contains the foo application created by the quickly command. Then we copy the target glade file, in this case we'll only copy the main window
$ copy $FOO_HOME/data/ui/FooWindow.ui quick/griffon-app/resources/foo-window.glade
Once the griffon-gtk plugin is installed (must be built from source at the moment, you won't find it at the central plugin repository) the View script is certainly very simple
The glade node instructs the builder to search for a glade file in the classpath, parse its contents and insert a widget whose id matches 'vbox1'. If you inspect the contents of foo-window.glade you'll find that vbox1 is the only child of the topmost window. However if you attempt to run the application right now you'll encounter a few errors. I have not located the source of the problem yet, it may be java-gnome's parsing capabilities or Quickly's version of glade xml, truth is you need to make some adjustments before getting some results. These are the required adjustments that need to be made on foo-window.glade
- change <interface> to <glade-interface>
- comment out <requires lib="gtk+" version="2.16"/>
- change all <object> elements to <widget>
- remove type="submenu" from every menu widget
- comment out the image1 element, we'll insert it on the Groovy side.
Note how an image node is nested inside the glade node (which resolves to vbox1) so the actual image is embedded into vbox1; the only change left is to reorder the nodes on vbox1.
These steps take care of reusing Quickly UI definitions on a Griffon application. What about the application's logic? If only there was a way to run python code on the JVM (hint, hint
)Keep on Groovying!
