New Perl GUI

nealbutler writes: "This is up on perl.com, and I suppose a lot of people have seen it, but I think it's cool enough to warrant an article! wxWindows, the free C++ Crossplatform GUI framework is now available for perl! I've wxPython, and it rocks, so Tk/Perl's days may now be numbered...My main development platform is (unfortunately...) Win32, and Tk/Perl doesn't have half as much Win32 stuff as wxWindows does (e.g. accessing proper windows dialog boxes, etc.)."

Comments

A GUI for Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heresy! Kill the heretics!
GUIs are bad. CLIs are good.

Defeats the purpose?

[jdevons]

Doesn't this defeat the purpose?

Every Windowed Perl programmer's first app will consist of a single window with an multi-line edit field and a button. When you press the button it will parse the test in the edit field and say "Hello World"

Re:Defeats the purpose?

[nealbutler]

Mine was actually a front-end for a number of file-parsing scripts I'd previously written....
And the file-selection dialog was horrendous!

:)

nb

IANA Expert in WxWindows programming

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that the concepts built into this module of what messages and actions a control can take are fairly limited. There are quite a few more messages a button control can take, for example. A message handler that caught MOUSE_OVER messages could allow some visual eyecandy by highlighting the control's appearance...

Is WxWindows really this simplistic, or is it just the tutorial?

Re:IANA Expert in WxWindows programming

[Jouke]

It's a tutorial. A first of a series. You start simple and make it more and more difficult along the way. I intentionally made this first tutorial as simple as possible. Keep monitoring Perl.com, because more wxPerl tutorials are coming up!

Jouke.

Re:IANA Expert in WxWindows programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, thanks.

I may have been putting the cart before the horse... :-)

Atricle doesn't do wxWindows justice.

[supersnail]

Having played around with wxPython, I can honestly say I will never go back to Tk or any other GUI interface.

What the article doesn't empahsise enough is that this is a cross platform GUI. The same code will work on win32, nearly all *nixes, plus apple and some wierd paltforms to boot.

The other thing the article doesn't impress strongly enough is how good the underlying C++ wxWindows library is. This is C++ GUI Nirvana, OO from the bottom up, crossplatform, native look and feel, a really useful set of builtin widgets, plus, perhaps most importantly a really well though out and easily extandable class structure.

From now on I will use nothing else, I may even give up programming curses.

Re:Atricle doesn't do wxWindows justice.

[cdmoyer]

What I noticed was how programs developed in wxWindows "feel" like they are written with the native widgets. I guess they are... My understanding is that the libraries for various platforms (wxWindows libraries, that is) are fairly light wrappers to provide a standard interface to the native widgets.

I also sympathize with your enjoyment on te wxWindows library. I was flabbergasted when I simply copied my wxWindows program, using wxGTK on linux to a windows box with cygwin, created a windows makefile, and viola...

Re:Atricle doesn't do wxWindows justice.

[Jouke]

Let me get one thing straight: we're not talking about a wxWindows advocacy article. It's a wxPerl tutorial. The article *does* mention that it is cross-platform! It *does* mention that the whole thing is *really* OO, more than for example Tk.

It's not about wxWindows and it's C++ interface. It's about wxPerl.

And indeed: apart from some maintenance on existing Tk apps, I will probably not use anything else than Wx anymore.

Jouke