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1 office 1 <?xml version='1.0' encoding="UTF-8"?>
2 <!DOCTYPE part PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
3 "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd" [
4 ]>
5 <part label="V">
6 <title>Related Tools</title>
7  
8 <partintro>
9 <para>
10 Several useful developer tools have been build around GObject
11 technology. The next sections briefly introduce them and link to
12 the respective project pages.
13 </para>
14  
15 <para>
16 For example, writing GObjects is often seen as a tedious task. It
17 requires a lot of typing and just doing a copy/paste requires a
18 great deal of care. A lot of projects and scripts have been
19 written to generate GObject skeleton form boilerplate code, or
20 even translating higher-level language into plain C.
21 </para>
22 </partintro>
23  
24 <chapter id="tools-vala">
25 <title>Vala</title>
26 <para>
27 From the <ulink url="https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala">Vala
28 homepage</ulink> itself: <quote>Vala is a new programming language
29 that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME
30 developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements
31 and without using a different ABI compared to applications and
32 libraries written in C.</quote>
33 </para>
34  
35 <para>
36 The syntax of Vala is similar to C#. The available compiler
37 translates Vala into GObject C code. It can also compile
38 non-GObject C, using plain C API.
39 </para>
40 </chapter>
41  
42 <chapter id="tools-gob">
43 <title>GObject builder</title>
44  
45 <para>
46 In order to help a GObject class developer, one obvious idea is
47 to use some sort of templates for the skeletons and then run
48 them through a special tool to generate the real C files. <ulink
49 url="http://www.5z.com/jirka/gob.html">GOB</ulink> (or GOB2) is
50 such a tool. It is a preprocessor which can be used to build
51 GObjects with inline C code so that there is no need to edit the
52 generated C code. The syntax is inspired by Java and Yacc or
53 Lex. The implementation is intentionally kept simple: the inline C
54 code provided by the user is not parsed.
55 </para>
56 </chapter>
57  
58 <chapter id="tools-ginspector">
59 <title>Graphical inspection of GObjects</title>
60  
61 <para>
62 Yet another tool that you may find helpful when working with
63 GObjects is <ulink
64 url="http://sourceforge.net/projects/g-inspector">G-Inspector</ulink>. It
65 is able to display GLib/GTK+ objects and their properties.
66 </para>
67 </chapter>
68  
69 <chapter id="tools-refdb">
70 <title>Debugging reference count problems</title>
71  
72 <para>
73 The reference counting scheme used by GObject does solve quite
74 a few memory management problems but also introduces new sources of bugs.
75 In large applications, finding the exact spot where the reference count
76 of an Object is not properly handled can be very difficult.
77 </para>
78 <para>
79 A useful tool in debugging reference counting problems is to
80 set breakpoints in gdb on g_object_ref() and g_object_unref().
81 Once you know the address of the object you are interested in,
82 you can make the breakpoints conditional:
83 <programlisting>
84 break g_object_ref if _object == 0xcafebabe
85 break g_object_unref if _object == 0xcafebabe
86 </programlisting>
87 </para>
88 </chapter>
89  
90 <chapter id="tools-gtkdoc">
91 <title>Writing API docs</title>
92  
93 <para>The API documentation for most of the GLib, GObject, GTK+ and GNOME
94 libraries is built with a combination of complex tools. Typically, the part of
95 the documentation which describes the behavior of each function is extracted
96 from the specially-formatted source code comments by a tool named gtk-doc which
97 generates DocBook XML and merges this DocBook XML with a set of master XML
98 DocBook files. These XML DocBook files are finally processed with xsltproc
99 (a small program part of the libxslt library) to generate the final HTML
100 output. Other tools can be used to generate PDF output from the source XML.
101 The following code excerpt shows what these comments look like.
102 <informalexample><programlisting>
103 /**
104 * gtk_widget_freeze_child_notify:
105 * @widget: a #GtkWidget
106 *
107 * Stops emission of "child-notify" signals on @widget. The signals are
108 * queued until gtk_widget_thaw_child_notify() is called on @widget.
109 *
110 * This is the analogue of g_object_freeze_notify() for child properties.
111 **/
112 void
113 gtk_widget_freeze_child_notify (GtkWidget *widget)
114 {
115 ...
116 </programlisting></informalexample>
117 </para>
118 <para>
119 Thorough
120 <ulink url="https://developer.gnome.org/gtk-doc-manual/stable/">documentation</ulink>
121 on how to set up and use gtk-doc in your project is provided on the
122 <ulink url="https://developer.gnome.org/">GNOME developer website</ulink>.
123 </para>
124 </chapter>
125 </part>