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

Confratores,

I was meditating on how I would develop a humble GUI application that should run on windows and linux ...

In my previous efforts I've been using Perl and Tk. This just works fine ... only, making the GUI is slow as I need to edit-run-view to look at the GUI.

Now, I just came across Blackadder, a GUI/Application development tool for Python and Ruby.

Does anybody of you fellow Perlers know about a similar tool for Perl/Tk or for Perl and any other windowing toolkit?

Humble Johan.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Perl GUI development...
by Rex(Wrecks) (Curate) on Mar 14, 2002 at 17:20 UTC
    I have used wxWindows sucessfully for a couple of small projects. Very easy to use, works on Gnome, KDE, and Win2K/WinXP. You don't mention the project, so I don't know if it will be good for your situation or not.

    Ther is also this on Perl/Tk for your consideration and WishPerl might be worth a look too.

    "Nothing is sure but death and taxes" I say combine the two and its death to all taxes!
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Re: Perl GUI development...
by drewbie (Chaplain) on Mar 14, 2002 at 17:03 UTC
    Well, there is the perl Gtk bindings, but I believe it is incomplete and has little to no documentation. So it's not really a choice. There is the Gnome bindings, but that is linux only. I wonder if Qt has perl bindings... But I know nothing about Qt and even less about C++. :-)

    My real suggestion is wxWindows. It's cross platform & uses native widgets. However someone told me last night that it was evil. Unfortunately, his subway stop was long before mine so I didn't get his full argument. It was something about it being very hard to subclass widgets to do custom stuff. I've heard good things about wxWindows from other people who are using it in real code, so YMMV.

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Re: Perl GUI development...
by $code or die (Deacon) on Mar 14, 2002 at 18:39 UTC

    You can use SpecTcl for desiging your Tk screens. It outputs perl with the help of SpecPerl.

    Also I think you can use Glade on Gnome similarly.

    Update: When I used SpecTcl it was on Windows and I think it was compiled with SpecPerl - at least I didn't need to download or install anything seperate to get Perl output. I've not used it on Linux.

    Update 2: As for the suggestions for wxWindows, I don't think this is suitable if you want a GUI builder. From what I remember there is a GUI builder for wxWindows but it is commercial software.

    See the excellent (GUI) Windows Programming FAQ

    ___ Simon Flack ($code or die)
    $,=reverse'"ro_';s,$,\$,;s,$,lc ref sub{},e;$,
    =~y'_"' ';eval"die";print $_,lc substr$@,0,3;
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      I have not yet used it, yet, but wxWorkshop (see sourceforge) is a GUI builder for wxWindows.

      --traveler

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Re: Perl GUI development...
by traveler (Parson) on Mar 14, 2002 at 17:28 UTC
    I have a similar need. I have gtk-perl code on Linux I'd like to port to Windows. (BTW, gtk in perl is soooo much easier than gtk in C.) Based on answers to my queries on the gtk-perl list, gtk-perl is really not usable on Win32 at this time. Gtk+ 2.0 is out and Win32 binaries should be out in April. Someone asked the gtk-perl list about generating the perl interface for *nix for 2.0 already.

    I am not sure why the Windows gtk-perl is not progressing except perhaps that the interest is from programmers without lots of Win32 programming experience. I count myself among that group (24 years of *nix C/C++ programming, but I have only done major Win32 stuff with Perl...).

    drewbie's suggestion of wxWindows is likely the best bet. I was hoping for a Gtk+ port to Win32, but may have to learn wxWindows.

    HTH, --traveler.

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