I've been playing with WxPerl for the better part of today and I must say it's really really good. In fact, it's the first Perl GUI toolkit that I feel good using. Tk works fine, but it's ugly and I keep getting lost in the docs. WxPerl looks native and Wx (the C++ foundation) has very good docs and is well mapped into Perl. Of the other GUI kits Win32 is a pain to use because the underlying system is a pain (not to mention that it's not portable, and I use Linux most of the time) and the others I tested (Gtk, Qt) simply don't build anywhere I tried.
What I'm trying to build is a small but complete app (a use Perl journal editor) in order to get a good feel for WxPerl as I intend to build a complex app soon after that. So far things are looking great. I'm taking my time as I test every other little option to see what it looks like (and am trying to do it cleanly because I know GUI apps become huge messes before you know it), but overall coding is fast.
Of course, I couldn't just sit there and do GUI programming without throwing in a little...... -- surpise ! -- ..... SAX Goodness ;) I found that typing in menubar and toolbar items was a bit too repetitive and not quite flexible enough. So now I have two classes that are the most simple SAX handlers ever that just take in an XML description of a menubar or toolbar and create it on the fly. Now I'm even happied with the thing :) Once I'm sure I've done it right, I might release those modules separately. YUM! Nice looking UI + SAX, what more can one ask?
I looked a little at wx but I'm already familiar with Tk and I didn't feel like learning another GUI builder. Not that I couldn't eventually be converted.
Re:Publish
darobin on 2002-02-23T16:52:17
If they are indeed handy -- which I'll see soon enough -- and if there isn't anything that fills that role as yet (I looked but so far I haven't found anything, even though XML->GUI is a fairly common thing to do these days) I will most certainly release them. I just don't want to release modules that won't be useful to anyone, or that are too much in flux as they now are. Either way I'll be releasing WxUp as soon as it's vaguely usable, and it'll ship with those inside.
If you're truly familiar with Tk, I'm not sure there's a point in switching. I'm reasonably familiar with it but I never felt at home there, which is why I've kept looking for other solutions. Wx seems to make more sense to me (notably the whole subclassing approach, which I find more natural for GUIs).
