MySQL: Building User Interfaces (Landmark)

Why You Should Use GTK+

If you are looking for a development environment for the Linux platform, you will have several to choose from. GTK+ is one of the leaders for GUI development on the Linux platform mainly for the following reasons:

• It is simple.   The complexity behind drawing widgets and handling events has been hidden from you, so you can focus on your application s functionality.

• It is extensible.   You can create your own widgets.

• It is open source.   You can read and modify the code.

• It is portable to other operating systems that support the X-Window system.   (Ports are also underway to MS Windows and BeOS, among others. However, as of this writing, they should still be considered in the early stages of development and used only with caution.)

• The GNOME desktop was built with GTK+.  

Other GUI toolkits are available for the Linux operating system, but none are as suited to our purposes. You may have heard of Motif. It can do most of what you will do later in this book, but it is more complicated and is not open source, so you have to purchase licenses. Another product, Qt, is as easy to implement as GTK+, but it is not free and is based on C++ instead of C.

You may be asking, Why is GTK+ and MySQL a good combination? The primary reason is C. GTK+ has bindings for other languages, but at its heart it is a C toolkit. The C API for MySQL is strong, flexible, and robust. C itself is an all-around good choice because of its ubiquity and portability. C has, without a doubt, withstood the test of time.