(ichimunki) Re: Full perl based application

Many of these questions are a tad vague.

There are several GUI toolkits for Perl, including one specifically targetted at Win 32: Win32::GUI, Tk, Qt, Wx, and it wouldn't surprise me if gtk were available on Windows as well.

Suggested google.com search "win32 GUI applications perl".

For licensing questions, you'd have to refer to ActiveState and the toolkit developers. Perl Monks are not qualified to give legal advice. :) But do look at Active State's Community License, it looks fairly friendly to me.

Distribution can be as easy as making clients download and install Perl (a good thing-- then they'll be able to use my scripts, too *grin*) and showing them how to set up a shortcut that launches your script. Unless something has changed, I haven't heard too many good things about trying to compile complex Perl apps into Windows stand-alone applications.

Comment on (ichimunki) Re: Full perl based application

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Re: (ichimunki) Re: Full perl based application by jplindstrom (Monsignor) on Oct 05, 2001 at 01:07 UTC
What, are you kidding? PerlApp works great! The cost: large .exe files. But disk space is cheap, so... The benefit: No installation problems whatsoever. Unzip your files, run the program. You're done. Without this, you definitely need to provide an installation program if your target audience even slightly resembles "normal" users. /J	[reply]
(ichimunki) Re x 3 : Full perl based application by ichimunki (Priest) on Oct 05, 2001 at 02:54 UTC
I stand corrected then, but this is the first I'm hearing where compiling (assuming this isn't mostly some pseudocompile process that results in an .exe) a Perl application on any platform (other than using perl itself) is a reliable process. What's the catch? And how big is a "large" .exe? 500K, 2mb, or 25mb? I see that it requires a Win2k machine to run, and that it requires a license-- and non-educational licenses look to be somewhat pricy (I am not exactly impoverished, but that DevKit costs more than my VCR did). But still, I can now say I've heard differently.	[reply]
Re: (ichimunki) Re x 3 : Full perl based application by entropy (Sexton) on Oct 05, 2001 at 03:06 UTC
perl2exe (or at least the evaluation version) works too. I compiled an application that used WxWindows, and the .exe file was 2-3 megs (plus the seperate WxWindows dll, also 2-3 megs). I had to add a special line in order to be able to "use constant", but other than that there have been no problems.	[reply]
Re: (ichimunki) Re x 3 : Full perl based application by jplindstrom (Monsignor) on Oct 05, 2001 at 11:37 UTC
A completely self contained PerlApp application starts at around 2mb. You can break out the perl5.dll file if you want to share it across many programs. On the one hand, disk space is cheap, on the other bandwidth isn't always that, so this may or may not be a problem. The key here isn't performance but ease-of-use for the end user when it comes to installing your program. /J	[reply]
Re: (ichimunki) Re: Full perl based application by rfb (Sexton) on Oct 05, 2001 at 00:29 UTC
yea, I guess my questions are pretty vague, still havent decided where were going with this tho. no clear plan.. I guess I just want to know what the issues would be, mabey some others' experiences. -rfb	[reply]