Re: good stable GUI library?

The last time I looked at Wx, it needed Gtk2 underneath it. I just setup the latest version of Gtk2-perl, and I must say it is awesome. It is the future. The big advantage of gtk2-perl over perl/tk is it has a constant, underlying library which has a cohesive design. Tk on the other hand is sort of a "hodge-podge" of widgets. The docs for gtk2-perl are still lacking, but you can see it coming together.

I envision that eventually there will be a very good GUI-designer program written for it, which will surpass Glade in functionality and bring it on par with Visual C/C++.

Tk is still easier for a beginner to learn, and gain the satisfaction of setting up a simple gui frontend for themselves, and Tk is still the closest thing to "cross-platform" out there. When someone wants Tk on Windows, it's an easy answer....ActiveState. Gtk2 is not so easy on Windows.

From the underlying libraries which are being developed, it seems that the choices are Gtk2 or Qt. Considering how popular Qt is (KDE etc), there sure isn't much interest in the perl bindings to the Qt libs. So that leaves Gtk2, which has very active development in the perl bindings.

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

Comment on Re: good stable GUI library?

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Re^2: good stable GUI library? by runrig (Abbot) on Oct 20, 2005 at 18:25 UTC
...there sure isn't much interest in the perl bindings to the Qt libs. Just to add, there are perl bindings for Qt version 3, which had a different license than version 4 (e.g. version 3 had only a commercial license for Windows and version 4 has a restricted free license for Windows). Sounds like version 4 would be more desirable, but from what I've read it would require a complete rewrite to come up with the perl bindings, and no one's come up with the tuits yet (update: there is a RubyQt for version 4). The author of Perl/Qt also came up with a PerlKDE, but that also requires old libraries, and hasn't been updated for a while.	[reply]
Re^2: good stable GUI library? by TGI (Parson) on Oct 20, 2005 at 21:20 UTC
I read this as an endorsement of Gtk2 for perl GUIs. Is that correct? At this point I am getting very frustrated with Tk, and I am very interested in other options. You say that it isn't easy to use Gtk on windows. What are the problems with windows? It looks like there is a PPM archive. So, while building your own code might be painful, are there any gotchas with using the "official" binaries? How hard is it to port from Tk to Gtk2? Are there any good porting guides? I found one for going from GTK to Gtk2. TGI says moo	[reply]
Re^3: good stable GUI library? by muppet (Initiate) on Oct 21, 2005 at 02:34 UTC
Tk's widget set is built-in; Gtk2 is a binding to an external library. The problems with Gtk2 on Windows pretty much stem from that. There are PPMs on the gtk2-perl website, but they don't include the gtk+ runtime, so you have to get that set up, too.	[reply]