In general, your information is correct, threads (and forking) do not play well with Perl/Tk. (It can be done but it isn't easy.)

Perhaps you may be able to use the POE framework to handle the sockets? POE will work with Tk, though you need to change how you think about the event loop a bit. (at least I did.)

my $sspid1 = open( $sockserver1, "sock_server.pl -params |" ) 
    or warn "can't start sock_server.pl: $!";
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This assumes that your sock_server.pl is designed so that: it gets all the info it needs for start-up (port number, etc) from command-line params; it uses its own internal file handles for reading/writing on the socket; and it writes whatever reports you want to its own STDOUT.

As indicated in the other reply, you'll need to set up the appropriate mechanism in Tk for reading from these processes while the GUI is handling input events from the user; I think Tk::FileEvent might do for that.

As for controlling the processes themselves (starting and stopping), maybe there's a way on Windows to send "suspend" and "resume" signals, or if it's not a big deal, just close those file handles (killing the processes) and reopen (restart) them as needed.

So you will not be able to "launch a new thread with a button click", however, you can signal an existing thread to do something. Create 2 sleeping threads first, then start a Tk front-end to control them. Check out Tk-with-worker-threads for an example of how it can be done.

The shared hashes and sleeping thread setup is the basic model I use with Tk, and works fine on linux and windows( earlier version of Windows like 95, 98, Me; don't handle big shared hashes very well. But this example works.)

The thing to remember with Tk and shared variables in threads, is that Tk will not "know" what the shared data is, until it actively tries to read it. So you can't use a shared variable as a reference, and expect it to update automatically....you need a timer to repeatedly check it.

Sweet,

I'm going to give that a try, it sounds promising. I'll post back my results....

Great. I was thinking about it a little more, and thought about the problem of reading the socket in the thread, and passing the data back thru shared variables. I've yet to see a way in main, to read a filehandle (socket) in the thread. So you might have to work out a scheme of pushing your socket reads into a shared array in the thread, then in the Tk program, setup a timer to shift data off of the shared array. That is the way I would do it, but you may have luck finding a way to read filehandles cross-thread.

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

I always try to do it in perl first because it's usually way easier and of course, I love perl.

If anyone else has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.