Handle With Linux

I just wanted to let everyone know PerlQt is great.

Tutorials and examples on PerlQt.wikidot.com

PerlQt is a very fast and easy way to create great looking GUI programs using the Qt drag and drop form designer and Perl. PerlQt is powerful enough for advanced developers and easy for beginners as well.

http://wxperl.sourceforge.net/

Hello there,

I have been thinking the same thing lately. I have been writing PHP for some time but have also found the desire to pick up a different language. My programming skills are by far too procedural and I would really like to become more Object Oriented. I have been drawn to Python some, but just recently. I have no preferences really, but would like to be able to develop both web and local applications. I am going to do some more research in regards to Perl, and keep my eye on your blog.

Keep us updated and good luck!

I started doing this many years ago with Perl/Tk, the main gui tool for Perl available then, and developed several tools over the years that I still use daily. Perl/Tk works in *nix and Windows (very portable). Unfortunately the widgets look dated and I don't believe it's still being maintained since the untimely death of it's author Nick Ing. Simmons (RIP).

I agree with your selection of Perl as a good basepoint language; it's flexible enough to do most anything you want (other than stringent OO) without always tripping over limitations (the way I find myself doing in bash) and lends itself well to migration.

I tend to code first in Perl. Running a Perl script does pull in the Perl interpreter, and on some old or small machines that can take too big a bite out of available memory, so if I need a program to be more shallow, I then take the time and trouble to translate it into shellscript. If I need the program to be faster, I push it into C instead.

Gtk is a great widget set, supported by a very good RAD, Glade, but it's a moving target; I've already been bit once by that, when I coded something in C using Gtk/Gnome 1 and the world moved to Gtk/Gnome 2 and things I was counting on got deprecated out. Now they're planning the next move, to Gnome 3? When I write something in Perl, I'd rather not have to migrate it to a new platform every few years. Plus, given that Gtk is tied to Gnome, which is tied to Mono, well, I'm doing whatever it takes to keep my systems from being infected with Mono and poisoned with Miguel's Redmond Kool-Aid.

Tk is a more mature and stable widget set. These days it looks maybe a little bit funky, but I can live with that, in return for its continuing to work long after I've moved on to other equally-pressing coding tasks. It's at least as universal as Gtk, probably moreso, so I can better count on my code running wherever it's installed. Spectix, which is written for and in Tcl/Tk but can emit Perl/Tk framework code, is a decent RAD for quickly whipping up a window layout. Perl/Tk is in CPAN, along with a bunch of new or improved widgets folks have contributed, so it basically goes everywhere Perl goes. Plus, I find Tk to be a good parallel to the widget set implicit in CGI, so I get two interfaces (local desktop in Tk, browser-based in CGI) for a lot less than twice the trouble. The Perl/Tk coverage in O'Reilly books helped me get productive quickly.

Go ahead and check out Perl/Gtk, as it can only help your understanding of event-based GUI systems, and no knowledge is ever totally wasted, but do also check out Perl/Tk.

You can post/link your blogs to ironman.enlightenedperl.org.