Re: Perl with a GUI

I started to play with GUI on Perl using Tk, but when I found http://wxperl.sf.net it was perfect.

wxPerl is much more portable than any other GUI library, is fast and has a lot of resources.

Note that wxPerl is a wrapper for wxWidgets, so, you need to use the documentation of wxWidgets (http://wxwidgets.org/) to use it's components.

For wxPerl we also have some extra modules already wrapped for Perl, like Wx::ActiveX where you can use IE, Flash and Windows Media Player from you app.

If you want portability and stability this is the choice.

Tk is also a good tool, but is not so stable (at least from the last time that I have played with it) and is ugly, since it's look will be always the same in all OS, and wxWidgets will look like the main GUI of the OS, so, we can use the nice look of Mac OS X, etc...

Applications using wxWidgets include:
AOL Communicator, Audacity, AVG AntiVirus, CADToMill, Chandler, Chess Commander, CTSim, Display Doctor, EarthVision, Forte Agent, HelpBlocks, ImageLinks, Intuitive MX, LDAP Explorer, Lmule, Mahogany, MinGW Developer Studio, MojoWorld, Musik, StoryLines, TerraIM, TortoiseCVS, VietAnh, Voxel 3D, Vulcan, wxBlogger, xCHM, Zeemo, Zempt ...

Graciliano M. P.
"Creativity is the expression of the liberty".

Comment on Re: Perl with a GUI

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Re^2: Perl with a GUI by Anonymous Monk on Jun 05, 2004 at 14:02 UTC
Nowadays Perl/Tk looks different on Win32 and Unix. You'd be hard-pressed to tell it appart from native widgets. For my part, I had to choose between Wx, Tk and Win32-GUI lately for a windows app (my first GUI app ever!), and I chose Tk because the relevant Perl documentation is more extensive (there's even several books on the subject) and it's the most used so lots of support is available. Win32-GUI is the worst with regards to documentation (almost non-existent) and I quickly discarded it. Wx is somewhere in between (mostly it tells you to read the C bindings!) Wx seems to have more widgets but it also seems a bit more complex and to require more actual code to accomplish something. Then again, there's tons of Tk widget modules on CPAN, so perhaps Wx doesn't really have an advantage in this area. In any case, I was able to find a suitable Tk widget for all my needs. I did run into a few problems with bugs in some Tk widgets, but they were easy to deal with (a quick google search turned up code to fix the problem). I don't know how Wx fares in this regard.	[reply]

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Re^2: Perl with a GUI
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 05, 2004 at 14:02 UTC

Nowadays Perl/Tk looks different on Win32 and Unix. You'd be hard-pressed to tell it appart from native widgets. For my part, I had to choose between Wx, Tk and Win32-GUI lately for a windows app (my first GUI app ever!), and I chose Tk because the relevant *Perl* documentation is more extensive (there's even several books on the subject) and it's the most used so lots of support is available. Win32-GUI is the worst with regards to documentation (almost non-existent) and I quickly discarded it. Wx is somewhere in between (mostly it tells you to read the C bindings!) Wx seems to have more widgets but it also seems a bit more complex and to require more actual code to accomplish something. Then again, there's tons of Tk widget modules on CPAN, so perhaps Wx doesn't really have an advantage in this area. In any case, I was able to find a suitable Tk widget for all my needs. I did run into a few problems with bugs in some Tk widgets, but they were easy to deal with (a quick google search turned up code to fix the problem). I don't know how Wx fares in this regard.

[reply]

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