Developing Bond Programs

With Bond 2.0, the development of Bond programs has changed considerably. No C knowledge is required to develop fairly robust database programs. Knowledge in XML and SQL are the only things necessary. Glade is a useful tool for generating the graphical user interface. Although not necessary, Glade does provide a nice WYSIWYG style GUI creator.

Converting your .glade file

Bond brings some changes with how Bond interacts with Glade. A developer is not tied to Glade to create the user interface for Bond, but can use it if he or she wishes. Later versions will make use of a glade file seamlessly with the database calls and actions (again only if desired), but for now an XSL transformation will convert your .glade file to a Bond XML file.

Here's an example of the conversion and how to use the result. Make sure you are in the glade2bond directory. Then type: xsltproc --novalid glade2bond.xsl test1.glade >output.xml This will place the result in output.xml. Now in your programs .conf file (eg bondfrontend.conf) specify the location of your Bond XML file to be output.xml (eg ../glade2bond/output.xml for the bondfrontend program.)

There are some test inputs and outputs in the glade2bond directory where you can see the result of transforming .glade files to Bond XML files. Also more information can be found in the README file in that directory. Note that the transformation is still under development and your glade file may not convert cleanly, in which case a little manual editing will be required for the GUI to display.