holandes777 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am a GTK neophyte: I would like to create a program that: 1) has a display (Gtk3) containing text fields and a button 2) can receive messages from other programs (socket) which modify the text fields (externally driven change) 3) and can send a message to another program when the button is pressed (via a socket) All the examples I have seen end in "Gtk3->main();", how do I get that to check on incoming messages?

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Re: Can GTK3 be driven externally?
by haukex (Archbishop) on Jan 30, 2020 at 16:19 UTC
[reply]
      Thank you, I am OK with socket programming. My question is: how do I blend the socket server with the GTK3 main loop?
      What I am trying to do is to use the GTK3 window as a display attached to a server that receives messages and changes the display to what the messages say needs to be displayed.
      Additionally, I'd like to have a button in GTK3 which would allow a user to select something.
[reply]

        Disclaimer: This is still just from quick Googling, I actually haven't done this myself, but I hope these pointers help. It looks to me like you would set up a GSocketService which has an incoming event, get the GSocketConnection's GSocket file descriptor, and then register that with a GIOChannel via g_io_add_watch. It also appears that one can write a handler for the client in a blocking manner in a separate thread via GThreadedSocketService.

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        As an example:
        I have a GTK3 display that displays 3 choices:
        Cats
        Dogs
        Rats
        However the backend system (another program) finds we are out of Rats, we do, however, have scorpions. The backend system contacts the display and sends a message "change the third button to Scorpions", without any user interaction at the display. The result:
        Cats
        Dogs
        Scorpions
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