This meditation is offered to those who may be interested in developping Graphic User Interfaces a bit more appealing and powerful than those with raw Perl/Tk (for example)

TkZinc (or Zinc) widget is very similar to Tk canvas in that they support structured graphics. Like the canvas, Zinc implements items used to display graphical entities. Those items can be manipulated and bindings can be associated with them to implement interaction behaviors. But unlike the canvas, TkZinc can structure the items in a hierarchy, has support for scaling and rotation, clipping can be set for sub-trees of the item hierarchy, supports muti-contour curves.

It also provides functions from openGL (when compiled with it), such as color gradient, antialiasing, alpha-transparencies and triangles item. The item set is quite more powerful and includes field specific items for Air Traffic systems; it may also be very usefull if you do not deal with Air-Traffic Control!

TkZinc has been freely available since Jan 2001 (on www.tkzinc.org), where you will also find a cvs and a bugzilla, the reference manual, FAQs, and more infos. Tk::Zinc has been uploaded on the CPAN since september 2003, thanks to discussions with YAPC::Eu::2003 participants.

A tutorial has been recently offered by brother zentara. His gift has been hidden in his pong with TkZinc snipset hymn and deserves more recognition.

Perl flavor of TkZinc work on win32 since May 2004.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Non web-based advanced GUI with TkZinc
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 24, 2003 at 05:13 UTC
    as the Perl flavor of TkZinc does not yet work on win32
    I noticed. Wx::GLCanvas however does work on win32 ;)
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      The problem is not openGL which is available on nearly all recent windows hosts, but ptk 800. I know that a not-yet-available development version of TkZinc has been successfully compiled by TkZinc author (not me, but P. Lecoanet). It required some minor evolutions in ptk804 by Nick Ing-Simmons. Thx to Nick! Another tricky problem is the compiler used for Tk and for Tk::Zinc ...

      So we could hope that Tk::Zinc will be available on windows plateform. If you are interested in, let us (or Patrick) know it. If you can help let us know also...

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Re: Non web-based advanced GUI with TkZinc
by Courage (Parson) on Nov 24, 2003 at 20:56 UTC
    as the Perl flavor of TkZinc does not yet work on win32
    Actually any Tcl/Tk extension could be used from Perl using Tcl::Tk available from CPAN, and I beleive TkZinc could also be used, once it is available in Tcl/Tk installation.

    This extension even provides perlTk-like syntax with use Tcl::Tk qw(:perlTk); -- see related documentation.
    I am planning to release updated version soon, but, as I believe, it is quite usable right now.

    Courage, the Cowardly Dog

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      Tcl/Tk extension could be used from Perl using Tcl::Tk available from CPAN, and TkZinc could also be used this way

      Your are right and one of our user (Lemort) did it with your holy help if I do not mistake. In fact he even recoded all Tk::Zinc method so that they (transparently) call Tcl::Tk codes. It has been tested successfully with some demos delivered with Tk::Zinc. The main advantage is that an application working on linux is easily ported on windows. Thanks to your work! The wrapper is available here , (now publicly available) or on Intuilab repository.

      However, there is still a problem: we are often using together with Tk::Zinc a software bus called Ivy.pm shortly described in a previous discussion 3 days ago in this monastery.

      This software bus can be used inside Tk event loop or in its own event loop. But our case, we should integrate it in the Tcl/Tk interpreter. The proper solution could be to use the C version of Ivy (Ivy exists on many languages and systems) and bind it to Tcl/Tk. This doesn't work yet.

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