GTK (GIMP Toolkit) is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed using the LGPL license, so you can develop open software, free software, or even commercial non-free software using GTK without having to spend anything for licenses or royalties.

It's called the GIMP toolkit because it was originally written for developing the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), but GTK has now been used in a large number of software projects, including the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) project. GTK is built on top of GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) which is basically a wrapper around the low-level functions for accessing the underlying windowing functions (Xlib in the case of the X windows system), and gdk-pixbuf, a library for client-side image manipulation. The Perl modules for these libraries are bound within the Gtk2 namespace, and are called Gtk2::Gdk and Gtk2::Gdk::Pixbuf.

The primary authors of GTK are:

GTK is currently maintained by:

GTK is essentially an object oriented application programmers interface (API). Although written completely in C, it is implemented using the idea of classes and callback functions (pointers to functions). The Perl module which binds this library is called Gtk2.

There is also a third component called GLib which contains a few replacements for some standard calls, as well as some additional functions for handling linked lists, etc. The replacement functions are used to increase GTK's portability, as some of the functions implemented here are not available or are nonstandard on other Unixes such as g_strerror(). Some also contain enhancements to the libc versions, such as g_malloc() that has enhanced debugging utilities.

In version 2.0, GLib has picked up the type system which forms the foundation for GTK's class hierarchy, the signal system which is used throughout GTK, a thread API which abstracts the different native thread APIs of the various platforms and a facility for loading modules. The Perl module that binds this library is called Glib.

As the last component, GTK uses the Pango library for internationalized text output. This library is bound within the Gtk2 namespace, inside the Gtk2::Pango module.

GTK2-Perl is the collective name for a set of perl bindings for Gtk+ 2.x and various related libraries. These modules make it easy to write Gtk and Gnome applications using a natural, perlish, object-oriented syntax.

The authors and maintainers of GTK2-Perl are: