Certainly I am not a huge fan of Perl/TK and if given a choice for something different I'd probably consider using it if my main goal was to make a stand alone application.

However I think you may also be looking in a direction that isn't entirely necessary and is probably reinventing the wheel. With a particularly useful and cross platform interface such as HTML why aren't IE, Netscape, Lynx and the myriad of other web browsers fine? HTML is an especially easy way to create a simple quick and easy interface and there is enough extendability that you can quite easily bury yourself in complex designs and interfaces.

Most of the work that I do, co-workers and friends in Perl that requires more than a rudemntary interface that can be done on the command line I usually just have the browser and CGI.pm handle it.

In my mind I guess the effort that would need to be put into replacing Perl/TK probably isn't worth it, and although the Java API might sound like a good foot print or reference for a design it can't really mesh with Perl well. The biggest problem probably being that Java is multi-threaded and Perl is sort of with the implication that it isn't even supported. So a lot of the cool tricks that you can do with Java to make a GUI just wouldn't translate well into Perl without a significant rewrite.

Maybe we'll see a whole new Perl out of 6 though and it may close a lot of the technical gaps that make many of these things difficult at best.

And I also don't mean to burst your bubble or anything, I think that something *very* cool could be done right now in that space. There certainly are no short comings of web browsers, *NIX platforms or anything else. It is always good to have choices and it is especially fun to do something else somebody has done so you can do it better!

In reply to Re: GUI by gaspodethewonderdog
in thread GUI by smileypete

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