Wireshark is based on the GTK toolkit, see: https://www.gtk.org
for
details. GTK is designed to hide the details of the underlying GUI in
a platform independent way. As this is appreciated for a
multiplatform tool, this has some drawbacks, as it will result in a
somewhat "non native" look and feel.
GTK is available for a lot of different platforms including, but not
limited to: Unix/Linux, Mac OS X and Win32. It's the foundation of
the famous GNOME desktop, so the future development of GTK should be
certain.
GTK is implemented in plain C (as is Wireshark itself), and available under
the LGPL (Lesser General Public License), being free to used by
commercial and noncommercial applications.
There are other similar toolkits like Qt, wxwidgets, ..., which could
also
be used for Wireshark. There's no "one and only" reason for or against
any of these toolkits. However, the decision towards GTK was made a
long time ago :-)
At the time this document is written there are two major GTK versions
available:
Please note: The HEAD (development) branch after the Wireshark release
1.0.0 does no longer contain code to support GTK 1.x!
GTK 1.x was the first major release. Today there are 1.2.x and 1.3.x
versions "in the wild", with only very limited differences in the API.
Advantages (compared to GTK 2.x):
Disadvantages:
GTK 1.x depends on the following libraries:
-
GDK (GDK is the abstraction layer
that allows GTK+ to support multiple
windowing systems. GDK provides drawing and window system facilities
on X11, Windows, and the Linux framebuffer device.)
-
GLib (A general-purpose utility
library, not specific to graphical user interfaces.
GLib provides many useful data types, macros, type conversions,
string utilities, file utilities, a main loop abstraction, and so on.)
GTK 1.x is working on GLib 1.x (typical for Unix like systems) or 2.x
(typical for Win32 like systems).
XXX: include Wireshark GTK1 screenshot
Advantages (compared to GTK 1.x):
-
nice look and feel (compared to version 1.x)
-
recommended for future developments
-
stable (in productive code for years now)
Disadvantages:
-
not available on all platforms (compared to version 1.x)
-
more dependencies compared to 1.x, see below
GTK 2.x depends on the following libraries:
-
GObject (Object library. Basis for GTK and others)
-
GLib (A general-purpose utility
library, not specific to graphical user interfaces.
GLib provides many useful data types, macros, type conversions,
string utilities, file utilities, a main loop abstraction, and so on.)
-
Pango (Pango is a library for internationalized text handling. It centers
around the #PangoLayout object, representing a paragraph of text.
Pango provides the engine for #GtkTextView, #GtkLabel, #GtkEntry, and
other widgets that display text.)
-
ATK (ATK is the Accessibility Toolkit. It provides a set of generic
interfaces allowing accessibility technologies to interact with a
graphical user interface. For example, a screen reader uses ATK to
discover the text in an interface and read it to blind users. GTK+
widgets have built-in support for accessibility using the ATK
framework.)
-
GdkPixbuf (This is a small library which allows you to create #GdkPixbuf
("pixel buffer") objects from image data or image files. Use a
#GdkPixbuf in combination with #GtkImage to display images.)
-
GDK (GDK is the abstraction layer that allows GTK+ to support multiple
windowing systems. GDK provides drawing and window system facilities
on X11, Windows, and the Linux framebuffer device.)
XXX: include Wireshark GTK2 screenshot
10.2.3. Compatibility GTK versions
The GTK library itself defines some values which makes it easy to
distinguish between the versions, e.g.:
GTK_MAJOR_VERSION GTK_MINOR_VERSION
will be set to the GTK version at compile time somewhere inside the
gtk.h headers.
10.2.4. GTK resources on the web
You can find several resources about GTK.
First of all, have a look at: https://www.gtk.org as this
will be the first place to look at. If you want to develop GTK related
things for Wireshark, the most important place might
be the GTK API documentation at: https://gtk.org/api/.
Several mailing lists are available about GTK development, see https://gtk.org/mailinglists.html, the gtk-app-devel-list
may be your friend.
There's no Win32 specific GTK mailing list. If you want to post
a Win32 specific problem (e.g. a problem in the GtkFileChooser dialog)
and you are sure that it's really Win32 specific, you
could send it to GIMPwin-users at https://www.gimp.org/mail_lists.html.
As it's often done wrong: You should post a mail to *help* the developers
there instead of only complaining. Posting such a thing like "I don't like
your dialog, it looks ugly" won't be of much help. You might think about
what you dislike and describe why you dislike it and provide a suggestion for a
better way.
