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Perlbox: A Unix Desktop Written in Perl
cascadefx writes "It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, PerlBox, written in Perl and Tk. I found this posted in response to an article on Perl Monks asking if Perl was obsessed with CGI?. Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting." I wonder how fast it runs?
I wonder how fast it runs?
About
this
fast
.
Dammit!!! I would have had first post if it wasn't for this perlbox desktop. ;)
Read my old comment to Subterfuge with Subterfugue story: Re:Perl in the Linux kernel? There's some info about other parts of the operating system written in Perl: Perl /bin tools, Perl shell and even Perl kernel.
I couldn't find a working link to Perl filesystem
(PerlFS by Claudio Calvelli?),
so if anyone knows it, please post it.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
more open source projects could easily benefit from a funding model like this. There seems to be research money floating around universities (mine included) that could easily go to open source projects; it just may not be the project you want to work on, but hey, getting paid isn't so bad.
Well, maybe Perl/Tk (which this Perl desktop thing uses) isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it does provide a cross-platform abstracted GUI toolkit for Perl. It's actually pretty decent. It also makes sense to piggy-back on technology (like Tk) which has been around for a while. The technology is more tried-and-true, and there are at least some Perl programmers who have tried Tcl-Tk and so it's not a huge jump.
:-)
Now, if someone wanted to write a real abstraction layer, maybe one that would let you use either Perl/Tk, Perl/GTK+, or something else... that coule be interesting
byroniverse
If you like stuff like PerlBox, you might also want to check out ROX-filer while you're at it. ROX-Filer an excellent file manager written in Python, and also offers a session manager, a wallpaper utility, a clock, etc, all written in Python. I'd recommend checking both PerlBox and ROX-Filer out.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Because we can?
I'd like to see distributing timesharing, so that all these people with *way* too much time on their hands could donate some to us people with sensible projects to complete but not enough time.
See Gtk, Gnome, Tk, Qt and Wx CPAN distros.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
You need mod_perlbox.
3 21&ycord=567
That way you can access your desktop through lynx at a speed increase of 800%. Just format your urls like this:
http://localhost/desktop/?action=leftclick&xcord=
Not to be confused with interpretive language which is what 90% of John Katz's work is written in. You know you've switched over when code like
my $wild_speculation = "..." starts cropping up in your code.
Of course, from a distance, Perl and Katz look just as unintelligible. At least Perl makes sense close up.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
runs as fast as KDE or Gnome!
Go program something new.
Like a desktop written in Perl?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Modules to play with and more info about it:
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
See Wx.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
gosh, i'm tired of hearing this.
if you develop some actual coding discipline, you can write very maintanable code in perl. use generous ammounts of whitespace, develop style rules for yourself and stick to them religiously, use descriptive full word variable names, separate compound statements into easier to understand (and easier to insert stuff between) smaller ones and of course take advantage of perl's '-w' and 'use strict' features. and if you think something still isn't clear, then for pete's sake comment it! don't blame poor coding practices on the language itself. you can just as easily write nasty unreadable code in c.
Actually, the _default_ Tk look and feel sucks rocks.
However -- the nice thing about Tk is that the widgets are
_extremely_ customisable. A bit of tweaking of the widget options and you can make it look pretty much like anything.
(Obviously within reason -- you can't change widget shapes, ferinstance).
All my Tk apps, for example, have the JFC/Swing 'Metal' look 'n feel, for a bit of consistency across Java and Tcl/Tk apps.
The only thing really holding me back from using this in my current project (front end management console for the build and test scripts used to QA $AntiVirus_app) in XUL is the lack of a nice drag and drop formbuilder. There's a project to build one - XULMaker - but it seems to be making pretty slow progress and be short of people working on it. Anyway, what I was wondering was, where's the Perl bindings? Being able to say :
...
;)
my $g = XUL->new();
$g->set_window(
title=> 'Hello world',
geometry => ([500, 200]),
)
...and so on would be verrrrry cool. And then we could ALL build our own window managers, using Perl. And this post would be on-topic
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Does this mean perl is now trying to compete with Emacs? This could get ugly...
Ruby vs Python vs Perl running Perlbox vs Emacs running everything vs Linux running KDE vs BSD running Gnome vs Windows vs Solaris running Emacs vs OSX running Virtual PC running Activestate Perl running Perlbox...
I think we need big a flow chart for this one.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You haven't checked out Wx. It's a Perl module for using wxWindows:
See the wxWindows supported platforms.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
I understood what it does.
It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, GNOME, written in C. I found this posted in response to an article on C Monks asking if C was obsessed with device drivers? Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting. I wonder how fast it runs?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Perl would kick Java's ass as a cross-platform app development language if it did
Seems a bit trollish, but I'll bite. If I wanted to make a large maintainable and updatable cross-platform app, with lots of time I'd choose Java. If I needed a cross-platform app that needed to be up in little time, and was never gonna be changed, I might chose your PERL with GUI Abstraction.
Honestly, though, I don't think it would "kick java's ass", its like compairing C and C++. Is one better than the other? Depends on how you use it!
A quick and powerful scripting language versus a high level object oriented language?
Apples and Oranges.
Surprisingly, though, they appear to be competing. Parrot, perls next version, contains error handling similar to Java, and Java1.4 added regexp.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Perl is spelled P-e-r-l not P-E-R-L, this is the first sign you don't know what you are talking about.
I simply copied the parent post's capitalization (not spelling). I've coded large products in both Perl and Java.
BTW - its attitudes like this that make non-technical people afraid to learn technical areas. You sound like a 1337 d00d in #linux-newbies that shouts "RTMFM!" at every question. I don't mind if you argue, but insulting is a sign of elitism, which I didn't think existed in UIDs as low as yours.
Perl is no more or less hard to understand or maintain than any other language if you code correctly. Sure I can make Perl look like line noise, but I can also make it easy to read and maintain.
I wasn't refering to the language itself (or how clean the code is) but the OO of Java vs. the scripting of Perl. Sure, there is OO in perl, but its slapped on and unelegant.
Its arguable, but most coders I know would find a well written, large scale, high level OO application easier to maintain and update than a large scale, powerful scripted application.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
> Don't Perl scripts get compiled every time they are run?
Yes, but it's compiled into an internal bytecode format, not an executable binary.
In this sense it's more like Java -> Bytecode -> JVM (hence Perl -> Bytecode -> PVM) than, say, C -> Object code -> Native Binary. Not quite, but near enough.
Python has the same property, as do many otherwise interpreted languages. Parrot (the engine Perl 6 will use) is also bytecode based, and probably has more in common with a Java VM, in that it impliments a sort of dynamic-language CPU with registers and instructions, rather than just a tree of tokens the interpreter can easily walk along.
Something really funky is going on. I type in www.perlbox.org, and the page that loads up is www.camelotnaturals.com
What the hell?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.