[Glade-devel] libglade ideas

[Olexiy Avramchenko]

todd wrote:

> Hi all,
>    I'm building an application that is relying heavily on libglade and 
> another xml binding.  I've noticed that because every part of the UI is
> built using glade and loaded using libglade that there is a noticeable 
> performance lag in loading the .glade files.  To give you an idea of the
> size of these interface files here is a line count.
>
>    195 simo-attached-documents.glade
>   1030 simo_calendar_view.glade
>    202 simo_dialogs.glade
>   1306 simo_event_view.glade
>    278 simo-fsa-msa-hsa-reimbursements-eob.glade
>   3314 simo.glade
>   1799 simo-home-view.glade
>   1305 simo-person-med-visit-detail.glade
>    101 simo-person-med-visit-summary.glade
>    100 simo-person-summary.glade
>   1009 simo-person-view.glade
>    563 simo-plan-reimbursements-eob.glade
>    152 simo_plan_view.glade
>    158 simo-provider-payments.glade
>    343 simo-sidebar-dialogs.glade
>  11551 simo-wizards.glade
>  23406 total
>
> I'm not loading them all at once; In fact I only load them once and 
> only when that part of the UI is requested.  My idea is to provide a 
> method for
> dumping the .glade into a binary format.  after looking into the 
> libglade source it looks like it could be possible to bipass the xml 
> parse code if this
> binary file exists and then just fread the data into the libglade hash 
> tables.  This should improve the load time by reducing the disk io.  
> (I think). 

Just compress your glade xml files with gzip if you want to reduce disk 
io. Libglade and glade UI builder works well with compressed xml files.

> I also learned that this is not an original idea; it is in fact very 
> similar to what mozilla has done to improve its startup performance 
> with xul.  I thought
> this would be something libglade would benefit from and that it would 
> be good for me to bring this up on the list.
>
> Has anyone started work on something like this?  If not i'd like to 
> start work on it and get as much input as possible about different 
> ways to approach
> this.

You can edit text/xml file with any editor from vi to MS Word and 
compressed text will take less space than parsed binary file, I beleive.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/textualitychapter.html

    Olexiy