Building GUIs with a GUI

[grinder]

I've been playing with Activestate's latest release, and I'm very impressed with the guied version of ppm. Snooping around in the source, it uses a package name Tkx. This is Gisle Aas's take on creating a Tk/Tcl interface. The end result is impressive: an application that has a true native look and feel about it. I want to know how easy it is to build something like it.

My question is, (and now that I think about it, it's not a really a Tkx question per se, but) are there any GUI builders around that let you drag widgets around the screen in a nice manner, and then spits out Perl stubs to flesh out the functionality? Bonus points for being able to round-trip the code through the designer and get it out again the other side, after having added or removed new widgets.

Other languages have these tools. Does Perl? I don't want to have to write 200 lines of method calls to build up my screen. That's so 20th century.

[planetscape]

This recent thread: GUI toolkit choice, appears to offer a nice overview of the available choices.

HTH,

[Fletch]

There's Glade and the companion Gtk2::GladeXML.

[gellyfish]

There is a perl binding for Glade which works quite nicely, however I'm not convinced that is particularly cross-platform.

/J\

[g0n]

I'm tinkering with wxGlade at the moment, with a moderate degree of success. Johan Vromans wrote a good article in the summer Perl Review on writing and maintaining GUIs with wxGlade. According to the article, wxGlade will round trip code in the way you describe, although I haven't tried it yet.

Of course, it generates Wx code, which is subject to the caveats on getting Wx to work I mentioned in the thread planetscape already cited.

You may also want to look at this thread on ZooZ - which generates Tk code.

[doowah2004]

You can check out Loft it is quite nice, but builds the gui for win32::Gui. It is a pain to install though, at least it was for me because of a conflict in the generation of the html documents, but after I changed the site for the install it all went smooth.

I have had very good results using the tool.

[vkon]

Tkx is small pure-perl module, which uses small Tcl module to connect to Tcl/Tk, which provides far more flexible GUI than perl/Tk.

Yes, you can use any GUI builder from Tcl/Tk and then use either Tkx or Tcl::Tk for further programming.

I use this approach now in all my Tk applications (although I do not actually use vtcl anymore, but I do mix pure-Tcl code with perl/Tk code).

So, welcome to the club!
Join mailing list tcltk-at-perl.org!
(this ML serves 3 CPAN modules: Tkx, Tcl::Tk and Tcl)