Chapter 1. GNOME Libraries Overview

Table of Contents
Where Do GNOME Libraries Fit
Structure of GNOME Libraries

Where Do GNOME Libraries Fit

Before going into the specifics of the GNOME libraries, it is important to see where do they fit in the picture of all the different libraries that are used in a GNOME application. The GNOME libraries are the most high level. GTK+ with it's two parts, GTK and GDK, comes next. GTK level provides an object model for C and a UI toolkit with the basic widgets to provide the generic basis for a GUI. GTK depends on GDK, which is a low-level wrapper around Xlib, the library directly talking to the X server. Everything (except for Xlib) depends on GLib which is a very useful C library with many utility and portability functions as well as a range of easy to use containers for C.

Figure 1-1. GNOME Application Library Hierarchy