Monks,

This is a subject I've been meaning to post about for about the last week or so, for various reasons, most importantly to find out what the rest of you think on the matter.

I work for a Very Large Corporation, and, as such, we have a large amount of "custom" software/scripts, simply because we have to be certain that everything does exactly what it's supposed to be doing. Much of this was developed in-house, and much of it is written in Perl (using a whole variety of versions from 4 up), making use of whichever modules were around at the time to make life easier.

Now, as part of my work at the moment, I'm developing a series of GUIs to sit on top of a shiny new database that we're (also) developing to allow users to, well, interact with the database.

It's important that these GUIs be portable (we use both WinNT and Unix), and the GUIs themselves will have little function except as a pretty front-end for data entry and updates.

I'm looking at my language options to code the GUI itself. The obvious choice is Perl, with Tk or a similar module to handle the widgets. A part of me, though, is saying that that's not the best way to go - and I'm looking as well at the possibility of using Java with the Swing toolkit (or something similar).

Java, in my opinion, would have a number of benefits - it's web-deployable for a start, which makes installation and revisions much easier than having to update a number of user systems sequentially. I guess I also see it as a language better-suited/better-equipped to handle a complex GUI than perhaps Perl/Tk.

On the other hand, most of the people here are Perl coders with little or no Java experience .. from a code/application maintenence point of view, that could make life a little more interesting. As such a large proportion of our code is already Perl, I guess it also makes sense to stick with that for consistency purposes.

I guess I should mention that Perl and Java aren't the only options available, although they do seem the easiest/most obvious choices.

I'm interested to know what others think about this - what would you choose, language-wise, in my situation, and why? Both seem to have benefits and drawbacks, as far as I can see, and it doesn't seem as clear-cut as I thought at first. I'm a firm believer in using the right tool for the right job, it just seems a little more difficult to choose that tool right now.

-- Foxcub

In reply to Choosing a GUI scripting language by Tanalis

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