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In the sections Concepts, Tools and Tutorial. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=736914
126 lines
4.8 KiB
XML
126 lines
4.8 KiB
XML
<?xml version='1.0' encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
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<!DOCTYPE part PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
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"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd" [
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]>
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<part label="V">
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<title>Related Tools</title>
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<partintro>
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<para>
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Several useful developer tools have been build around GObject
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technology. The next sections briefly introduce them and link to
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the respective project pages.
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</para>
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<para>
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For example, writing GObjects is often seen as a tedious task. It
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requires a lot of typing and just doing a copy/paste requires a
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great deal of care. A lot of projects and scripts have been
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written to generate GObject skeleton form boilerplate code, or
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even translating higher-level language into plain C.
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</para>
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</partintro>
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<chapter id="tools-vala">
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<title>Vala</title>
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<para>
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From the <ulink url="https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala">Vala
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homepage</ulink> itself: <quote>Vala is a new programming language
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that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME
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developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements
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and without using a different ABI compared to applications and
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libraries written in C.</quote>
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</para>
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<para>
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The syntax of Vala is similar to C#. The available compiler
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translates Vala into GObject C code. It can also compile
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non-GObject C, using plain C API.
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</para>
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</chapter>
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<chapter id="tools-gob">
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<title>GObject builder</title>
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<para>
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In order to help a GObject class developer, one obvious idea is
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to use some sort of templates for the skeletons and then run
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them through a special tool to generate the real C files. <ulink
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url="http://www.5z.com/jirka/gob.html">GOB</ulink> (or GOB2) is
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such a tool. It is a preprocessor which can be used to build
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GObjects with inline C code so that there is no need to edit the
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generated C code. The syntax is inspired by Java and Yacc or
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Lex. The implementation is intentionally kept simple: the inline C
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code provided by the user is not parsed.
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</para>
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</chapter>
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<chapter id="tools-ginspector">
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<title>Graphical inspection of GObjects</title>
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<para>
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Yet another tool that you may find helpful when working with
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GObjects is <ulink
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url="http://sourceforge.net/projects/g-inspector">G-Inspector</ulink>. It
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is able to display GLib/GTK+ objects and their properties.
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</para>
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</chapter>
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<chapter id="tools-refdb">
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<title>Debugging reference count problems</title>
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<para>
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The reference counting scheme used by GObject does solve quite
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a few memory management problems but also introduces new sources of bugs.
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In large applications, finding the exact spot where the reference count
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of an Object is not properly handled can be very difficult.
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</para>
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<para>
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A useful tool in debugging reference counting problems is to
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set breakpoints in gdb on g_object_ref() and g_object_unref().
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Once you know the address of the object you are interested in,
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you can make the breakpoints conditional:
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<programlisting>
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break g_object_ref if _object == 0xcafebabe
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break g_object_unref if _object == 0xcafebabe
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</programlisting>
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</para>
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</chapter>
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<chapter id="tools-gtkdoc">
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<title>Writing API docs</title>
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<para>The API documentation for most of the GLib, GObject, GTK+ and GNOME
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libraries is built with a combination of complex tools. Typically, the part of
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the documentation which describes the behavior of each function is extracted
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from the specially-formatted source code comments by a tool named gtk-doc which
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generates DocBook XML and merges this DocBook XML with a set of master XML
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DocBook files. These XML DocBook files are finally processed with xsltproc
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(a small program part of the libxslt library) to generate the final HTML
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output. Other tools can be used to generate PDF output from the source XML.
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The following code excerpt shows what these comments look like.
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<informalexample><programlisting>
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/**
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* gtk_widget_freeze_child_notify:
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* @widget: a #GtkWidget
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*
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* Stops emission of "child-notify" signals on @widget. The signals are
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* queued until gtk_widget_thaw_child_notify() is called on @widget.
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*
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* This is the analogue of g_object_freeze_notify() for child properties.
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**/
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void
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gtk_widget_freeze_child_notify (GtkWidget *widget)
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{
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...
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</programlisting></informalexample>
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</para>
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<para>
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Thorough
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<ulink url="https://developer.gnome.org/gtk-doc-manual/stable/">documentation</ulink>
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on how to set up and use gtk-doc in your project is provided on the
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<ulink url="https://developer.gnome.org/">GNOME developer website</ulink>.
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</para>
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</chapter>
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</part>
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