Believe me, writing your code from scratch is alot easier than trying to decipher the boilerplate code produced by the various tools to produce easy GUIs.

If you were going to go that route, Glade is probably your best bet.

The problem with boilerplate code is the obtuse naming conventions needed for creating callbacks. For instance instead of a callback called "do_what_button_1_does", you might get sub 1awer4567, and that makes it harder to track down little bugs.

In reality, the GUI creators are the ones that make it easy for simple gui's, but anything more complicated, you are better off writing it from scratch.

It takes time to learn either way. Either you can put in a few hours to learn from scratch, or you can put in a few hours learning the easy gui system, whatever it is.

If you are in a situation, where you are repeatedly making gui's from some simple recipe, and you want to automate it for non-experienced users, then the easy gui creators may be useful.

Just my opinion. :-)

I don't use GUI creators/generators for Perl/Tk. My reasons are much the same as zentara has posted above.

I often see monolithic code that builds the entire GUI. Apart from being a poor programming technique to start with; it becomes a maintenance nightmare with anything beyond the simplest GUI. I aim for a modular approach. Here's a very rough example:

use Tk;

{
    my $mw = Tk::MainWindow->new();

    configure_main_window($mw);

    build_menubar($mw);
    build_toolbar($mw);
    build_main_content($mw);
    build_statusbar($mw);
}

MainLoop;

sub build_main_content {
    my ($mw) = @_;

    my $main_content_frame = $mw->Frame();

    build_input_widgets($main_content_frame);
    build_output_widgets($main_content_frame);
    build_action_widgets($main_content_frame);
}
[download]

Once you have a basic skeleton, you can use this as a template for all your GUIs. Now you're starting to create your own automated tool.

You'll find that using this method will give all your GUIs the same look and feel. It also saves a lot of time because you don't need to write every new GUI from scratch.

If you're building many GUIs, you can write a script which further automates the process. This might be a commandline tool with options like --toolbar (a boolean switch indicating whether to include a toolbar), --title (providing the argument to $mw->title()), and so on. This tool would create the skeleton code for you based on your template.

At the end of the day, choose whatever suits your needs best. Try to temper your choice with thoughts of: maintenance, extension, debugging, and so on.

Thanks everyone for the answers.

Has anyone tried creating the GUI in a different language (such as Java) and have it interact with the perl script ?

Since I've been primarily working in the world of Windows, I've been using Win32::GUI. To help speed up the development, I've been using the GUI Loft. It allows me to quickly set up the GUI look and appearance. However, I then have the to generate the code by hand and refer back to the GUI Loft for the size and location coordinates.

I can't advocate that Win32::GUI is "best" GUI module/method since it's the only one that I have experience with. However, if you do decide to use it, I'd definitely recommend getting the GUI Loft. Just keep in mind that the GUI Loft hasn't been updated in a long time and is using an older Win32::GUI module than what is currently available, which means that all of its options on objects don't necessarily match up with the current Win32::GUI module.

I've been meaning to take a look into learning Tk so that I can create more cross-platform GUIs, but haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

It seems that this link is no longer active. In any case, I was referring mostly to Linux based systems.

There were many links, and ZooZ/Guido/TikiArtist/SpecTcl are available