Quick and dirty linux GUI programming

I hardly use GTK directly anymore. 99% I do in libglade, where the UI comes from an XML file. Much easier and more flexible. There's also the Glade UI builder that will create the XML files for you. Making GUI apps with libglade is much, much quicker than doing it by hand with GTK calls.

I'm not an expert, but is there a general trend to higher-level platforms? I suppose glade is higher level than GTK, and today there's GWT, XUL and lots of other stuff.

I'm not sure if it really qualifies as higher level. On the one hand yes, because libglade does 99% of what use to be manual GTK coding. On the other hand not. The XML structure of glade is much more similar to the in-memory object representation of the GUI. I think it's on the same level, really.

You can compare it with DOM XML I suppose. You can create a DOM tree manually by calling all kinds of addNode(), setAttribute() and appendChild() calls, or you can parse an XML file with a single function call. In both cases you end up with the same with: The in-memory DOM. But the second method is much easier than the first.

I am really, really surprised KDE still does not have this.