Perl may very well be the right tool for the job on the back-end. The tablet side will probably let you do either a Web app (which will work, but will not be optimum for the platform), or a native one, which will give you the best performance and appearance. If it's not an iPad/Xoom/etc., and is a full-up computer running Windows or Linux, then you could use Perl on the client side, probably LWP or WWW::Mechanize -- or maybe the native browser will be sufficient.

Back-end wise, you have a ton of options. In Perl, there's Catalyst, Dancer, and Mojo; in Ruby, you've got Rails; in Python, you've got Django, Zope, and probably others.

The real problem is that the problem space is so big that there's no good way to narrow the choices down solely on the basis of feature set.

Editing, based on discussion above: yes, Perl could be a good choice, but so could any of the others. Remember that wireless and Bluetooth are just transport mechanisms; the protocol you use across the link is completely up to you. I've seen (from my experience with iPhone apps) custom TCP-based APIs; RESTish APIs, WebDAV implementations (over Bluetooth or wireless, depending on which you had handy). So: if it's iOS-related, I'd be happy to talk to you about my experiences with that offline (I've implemented a streaming-audio-over-TCP server that uses standard HTTP protocols over wireless, and can show you sample code for connecting to HTTP servers via URLs); can't help a lot with Bluetooth directly, but I'd be happy to help you find the resources in the iOS documentation. Basically, though, you can implement it very much as if it were a good old CGI app and connect to it that way as long as your server understands how to talk over the protocols you've selected. I will guess that wireless will be much easier than Bluetooth, but I may be wrong.

In reply to Re: Perl, the right tool for the job? by pemungkah
in thread Perl, the right tool for the job? by Anonymous Monk

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