in reply to Is there a really perlish user interface module, or something?
Thank you all very much for answering. I was afraid I am commiting a blasphemy and will receive much flame, now I am very glad have all these friendly and cooperative answers.
To dragonchild: yes, I'am planning to do that. Actually I am much more a software designer than a programmer, so I think I can write a useful spec, but coding this module seems to be beyond my skills. Is a there a spec/design template that the Perl community usually uses, or at least some guidelines how to design Perl modules and start open source projects? And where to post it (besides here)?
To Aristotle and ctilmes: GTK and Qt are useful, of course, the big problem is with portability between Linux and Windows - I use Linux at home and Windows at work - I think this combo is not unheard of ;-) Besides, it also would be important to switch easily (f.e. by a command-line parameter to your program) between GUI and textmode UI, because Perl is often used on Linux servers. I actually don't really like stuff like the Glade designer - IMHO they jacks-of-all-trades and not really optimized for text/data/database applications where Perl excels.
Maybe... maybe there is no need to write a module by hand. Is it possible to make a Perl module from C++ ? From a LIB? If it is, then maybe it is already done.
I will tell you a story.
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, on a planet called Earth, in a country called Hungary (I am Hungarian) a small company called ComFirm wrote and maintained a very big, hundreds of thousands lines of code banking software called Konto. (No, it was not KDE-based. There still are some words that start with K but have nothing to do with KDE :-)))) ) It was written in Clipper '87. Years gone by and Clipper became obsolete. What to do? Rewrite hundreds of thousands lines of code in another language? No bloody way. They rewrote the language instead. They wrote a precompiler that created C++ code from Clipper code. This was called CCC: Clipper to C++ Compiler. And then the CCC compiler developed on and on, drifted a little bit farther from Clipper, closer to Linux, etc. It is a really cool stuff, I would use it if had a decent regexp engine (this is what I like most in Perl) and would not be supported by only 2 guys. But the important stuff is the UI now. From traditional Clipper code for browse, mask, alert and achoice, the CCC Compiler by a simple compilation directive can compile Linux textmode, Linux FLTK GUI (Fast Light ToolKit), HP-Unix and Solaris textmode, Windows console and Windows GUI and even DOS textmode user interface. By creating LIBs, it may be possible to create Perl modules. Is it? It's C++, not C!
cum venerationie,
Shenpen