All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

perlbrowser

brian_d_foy on 2003-11-27T15:32:35

I am getting up really early every day because I just cannot sleep that long. My body is not used to all of this free time.

And, now that I have an open ssh port, I can commit a lot of the things I have been working on them. Not only do other people have to worry about the back-ups and whatnot, but other people can see them too.

I committed to CVS my Perl Module Browser. I have decided to call it a module browser since perl does not really operate at the class level. I could create a module Acme::SomeoneElse, but it could really define the LWP::Tetris package. The file name is not the package.

What I have now depends on Tk and CPAN.pm, so you have to be able to use those. CPAN.pm likes to get things off of the network unless you have a local CPAN (but you could probably fake it with just the modules directory which has the meta-data files which I need).

Despite its early stages and primitive nature, it has been very useful to me already. I am even using it to develop it, although Apache::Pod can deliver a lot of the same stuff.

If you want to skip the hassle of installing Tk and making an X server work on your Mac, I have one [24k PDF] or two [24k PDF] pretty pictures.

The SourceForge CVS browser seems to be having problems at the moment (maybe it needs to update from a master server or something). You can use anonymous CVS to checkout the sources. The password is "anonymous". Enter that after using cvs login.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/brian-d-foy login
 
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/brian-d-foy co perlbrowser


The next thing I need to do is handle links in the POD so that I can jump from one module to the next. I am not sure how I want to do this. Maybe I should make the text in the big pane HTML if someone already has a widget for that sort of thing.

I would also like to add tabs so I can keep the size of the main window small but still give access to a lot of information. I am thinking about the pane that some web browsers put on the left to show histories, links, and so on. I need to learn more Tk though. That is a lot more difficult than any of the simple widgets I have ever made.

Of course, a lot of this stuff would be really easy to do as a mod_perl plug-in, and I should develop this thing to keep the display layer separate, but for now I am playing with Tk. I do not want to assume that every computer will have a webserver anyway (although part of perlbrowser could be a tiny webserver).