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

I've been trying to figure out how to use Gtk2::Plug and Gtk2::Socket for awhile, but I've recently stumbled across this PyGTK FAQ Entry. From what I understand, embedding an arbitrary program which adheres to the XEMBED protocol is fairly straight forward:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Gtk2 '-init';

my $window = new Gtk2::Window;
my $socket = new Gtk2::Socket;

$window->add($socket);
$socket->add_id($window_id_of_program_to_embed);
$window->show_all;

Gtk2->main;

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The biggest problem I see with this is trying to launch the program to embed and determine it's window id. I've written a code in c using X11 functions to determine the window id of a program given it's name, class, and classname (from `xprop`):

int main(void) {
    int i;
    unsigned int number_of_children;

    Display *display;
    Window window, root, *children, window_root, window_parent;
    XClassHint class_hint;
    XTextProperty wmname;

    if (!(display = XOpenDisplay(":0.0"))) return 1;
    if (!(root = DefaultRootWindow(display))) return 1;
    if (!(XQueryTree(display, root, &window_root, &window_parent, &chi
+ldren, &number_of_children))) return 1;
    if (!(number_of_children > 0)) return 1;

    for (i=0;i<number_of_children;i++) {
        if (!XGetWMName(display, *(children+i), &wmname)) continue;
        if (!XGetClassHint(display, *(children+i), &class_hint)) conti
+nue;

        if (
            (strcmp("Volume", (char *) wmname.value) == 0) &&
            (strcmp("gnome-settings-daemon", class_hint.res_name) == 0
+) &&
            (strcmp("Gnome-settings-daemon", class_hint.res_class) == 
+0)
        ) {
            window = *(children+i);
            break;
        }
    }
    if (number_of_children > 0) XFree(children);
    if (i == number_of_children) return 1;

    printf("Found window id 0x%x\n", window);

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But I don't know how to find the window id in a cross platform manner, much less keep track of the window id generated by a spawned process.

For that matter, I've tried searching CPAN to find the perl module containing the above X11 functions, but nothing was obvious (X11::Lib and Tk::Xlib have promising names, but aren't documented). If I end up having to switch on $^O, I have no idea how to determine the window id (or hwnd?) on windows, much less with all the pertinent error checking demonstrated in the c code above.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Embedding Programs with Gtk2::Socket
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 18, 2006 at 18:46 UTC
    For Unix+X, you can use Gnome2::Wnck. Don't worry about the "Gnome2" part; it only depends on Gtk2. 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Gnome2::Wnck;

Gtk2 -> init();

my $screen = Gnome2::Wnck::Screen -> get_default();
$screen -> force_update();

my @windows = $screen -> get_windows();

foreach my $window (@windows) {
  my $name = $window -> get_name();
  my $class_name = $window -> get_class_group() -> get_name();

  print <<"EOS";
$window
  name: $name
  class name: $class_name
EOS
}

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Re: Embedding Programs with Gtk2::Socket
by zentara (Cardinal) on Jul 19, 2006 at 13:52 UTC
    I am not up2-speed on plug and gtk2, but this is an example I have which may help you. There are 2 scripts, plug.pl and socket, put them into a directory and run socket.
    Read more... (6 kB)
    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum
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Re: Embedding Programs with Gtk2::Socket
by alexxxm (Acolyte) on Sep 15, 2010 at 11:16 UTC
    I dont know if you succeeded in this problem, but I would be very interested to have fresh news.

    As a side note, I had problems compiling your C program, until I added

    #include <stdio.h>
#include <X11/Xlib.h>
#include <X11/Xutil.h>

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    moreover, I was unable to run the perl program: I let it collect the xid by: 
    $window_id_of_program_to_embed=`getwindowid2 $windowname`;

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    (where getwindowid2 is your C program, which outputs just the numerical idof any window named $windowname)

    the program just creates an empty box, without errors/warnings, and the app to be embedded just stays there.

    Any idea?

    alessandro

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