GUIs with perl?

[CTho9305]

I'm looking to write a GUI app, and want to use perl for a few important reasons (everyone I work with knows it--so I won't be the only person who can maintain the app, I have some perl modules that will be very useful and really don't want to reimplement them in another language, and I'll be doing some heavy string-manipulation stuff).

I spent some time today looking at Tk, and it's not too hard to use, but it's butt ugly. That isn't a huge problem (most of the tools I use at work look awful), but if there's an alternative that's not worse in other ways, I'd prefer it.

It wasn't clear to me when/if "Tile" will ever replace it, and if it does, how much rewriting would be required to switch.

Suggestions? If Tk is my best bet, good tutorials would be appreciated.

 

[kamper]

There's lots of gui toolkits and I'm sure there are one or more perl interfaces for most of them. Qt, gtk and wxwidgets come to mind as relatively well known and modernish ones. Of course, I am in no way speaking from any experience with using any of the above, just speculating.

 

[FP]

Don't use Perl for your view. Use Perl in your backend and use something like Flex or Mason for the front-end.

This is a perfect opportunity to learn something new.

 

[CTho9305]

Learning something new is all well and good until someone finds a bug or wants a feature and I'm the only person who can maintain it.

 

[IronWing]

Originally posted by: CTho9305
Learning something new is all well and good until someone finds a bug or wants a feature and I'm the only person who can maintain it.

You'll be the only one who knows Tk so you'll still be stuck maintaining it. My very limited experience with Tk is that it is very easy to make a gui that functions properly and very time consuming to make one that looks good.

 

[Crusty]

Why not have a web based gui?

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: CTho9305
Learning something new is all well and good until someone finds a bug or wants a feature and I'm the only person who can maintain it.

Well, as ironwing pointed out, you'll be learning something new one way or another and you're obviously well acquainted with web stuff. Is the nature of the app user driven (as in, it doesn't matter what machine it runs on, as long as they can see the ui) or is the purpose of it to manipulate something on a specific machine?

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Crusty
Why not have a web based gui?

There's a lot of intialization required (parsing large input files), so each invocation would take a while.

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: CTho9305
Learning something new is all well and good until someone finds a bug or wants a feature and I'm the only person who can maintain it.

Well, as ironwing pointed out, you'll be learning something new one way or another and you're obviously well acquainted with web stuff. Is the nature of the app user driven (as in, it doesn't matter what machine it runs on, as long as they can see the ui) or is the purpose of it to manipulate something on a specific machine?

Yes, that is a problem, but I think it'd be easier for others to follow if it's all a single self-contained app in one language.