According to the Introduction page:
And the benefits are:This is the homepage of the GTK-server. The GTK-server is a free, open-source project, which offers a stream-oriented interface to the GTK libraries, enabling access to graphical user interfaces for shellscripts and interpreted programming languages using either GTK 1.x or 2.x. It was inspired by Sun's DeskTop KornShell (dtksh) of the Common Desktop Enviroment (CDE) for Unix.
What the difference between gtk-server and all other GUI dialogs?Below a summary of advantages when using the GTK-server.
- No need to learn C or C++, you can stick to your favorite programming language
- No need to hack the source of existing interpreters to realize GUI programming
- High flexibility in creating GUI's, e.g. not limited to dialogs
- Full GTK API available, the user can extend the 'gtk-server.cfg' file by himself
- Access to both GTK 1.x and GTK 2.x
- Convenient GTK test tool, easy to learn GTK programming
- Mix 64-bit userinterfaces with your 32-bit client programs
1. Xdialog, yad, zenity, are more or less the same thing - they are all single-shot GUI dialog maker - display a dialog, user clicks something, close dialog and return values.
2. gtkdialog is much more flexible - it builds and runs the GUI. It responds to user interaction with GUI - either by executing internal actions, or calling external programs. It only quits then told to quit.
3. gtk-server is very much like gtkdialog - except, one has full access to entire GTK+ functions. The other difference is that the GUI component and the actual application code is totally separate, they are not inter-mixed as in gtkdialog.
gtk-server does require higher learning curve than gtkdialog because one needs to know GTK itself to write stuff with it. But the payback is that one has much more finer-grained control over the GUI compared to gtkdialog. gtk-server also opens the possibility of designing the GUI using a GUI builder (e.g. glade) instead of writing code, and only write code for interaction with the external applications. There are other interesting non-gtk stuff you can do with it - I won't spoil that for you, go and explore the site if you're interested
Did I mention this is also from the creator of BaCon (Peter van Eerten)?
cheers!