I am currently trying to convince the powers that be to replace thousands of lines of code in a statically-typed language (which mysteriously fails on occasion) with about 40 lines of perl. The language its written in is good for designing a GUI but bad for this job which just needs to run in the background. I am told it would be a more attractive option if we can deliver an exe file, without having to have customers install perl and DBI and DBD::ODBC, so maybe ActiveState is the way to go? Or PAR if it works for this (or would PAR break the ActiveState license in this case even if it did work)?
Ya know, you can compile Perl on Windows out of the box these days. You can use that instead of ActivePerl if you want to ship a PAR executable.
If PAR won't do it (which it should) there's always Ye Olde--umm, reliable?--perl2exe.
Re:perl2exe
runrig on 2003-08-20T17:24:53
Ya know, you can compile Perl on Windows out of the box these days.That's if you have a compiler for Windows
:-) It would be a choice between buying a compiler or buying ActiveState's DevKit (or perl2exe). I'm lazy, so I'm thinking it might be simpler to just go with the ActiveState thing. Perl2Exe Lite is cheaper, though perl2exe Pro is only marginally cheaper. Re:perl2exe
schwern on 2003-08-20T23:13:58
Its the choice between buying a single license for a compiler or paying for an ActivePerl distribution license. Or does that come with the AS DevKit?Re:perl2exe
runrig on 2003-08-21T00:01:48
One would hope that a product that allows you to produce a stand-alone executable (which must be created on a machine with perl installed) would allow you to distribute that executable to a machine where perl is not installed. I've installed the evaluation copy of the PDK, and I don't see anything to the contrary mentioned, though I could be wrong.Re:perl2exe
schwern on 2003-08-21T18:05:14
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Commercial Software.
Keep your eye on this.
Re:perl2exe
runrig on 2003-08-21T22:01:31
I poked around the site, and found this more relevant agreement (This is what I must have agreed to when I installed the software:-). Section 1 is the most applicable. I think as long as I don't allow an end user to do "eval $string" I'm ok. I'm also now leaning more toward this PDK because it includes other goodies, like creating ActiveX libraries that I can call from other sucky languages (and I'm looking forward to coming up with a compelling reason to call perl regexes from the language we use). And maybe even write .NET components if I'm forced to go that way in the future. o/` Stop! Lawyer time. o/`
schwern on 2003-08-22T02:10:15
IANAL but at this point I think you should find one. Or at least contact AS for clarification.
