“What is GNOME?
GNOME is a number of things: It’s a graphical environment for UNIX;
a collection of useful, small applications and utilities; and a set
of application-programming libraries. For now, we’ll concentrate on
the GNOME libraries, which can help developers build
GNOME-compliant, consistent, and powerful GUI applications quickly
and with minimal effort.”
“Why use GNOME libraries?
Why not just program directly with a GUI toolkit such as GTK+,
Motif, or Qt, without any other libraries? These tools have their
advantages, but I believe the advantages of using the GNOME
libraries far outweigh them. By using the GNOME libraries, you can
save a lot time, because a lot of code is already written, and a
lot of widgets are already created. These widgets will also be
consistent in both look and feel across all applications using the
GNOME libraries. And code sharing among applications reduces your
memory requirements, because the code will be part of the shared
library rather than loaded into memory for each application. But
GNOME’s greatest advantage is that the library lets you focus on
the real functionality of your application; you don’t have to spend
your time writing and debugging the user interface.”
“Writing GNOME applications
So you’re convinced you want to use GNOME? OK, let’s start with the
basics: A GNOME application uses a hierarchy of several libraries,
with the GNOME libraries making up the highest level. The GNOME
libraries contain helper routines, classes, and specialized widgets
(such as GnomeCanvas, a fast, flicker-free, high-level drawing
widget), and provide a framework for the application.”