Visual Perl/Tk
GUI development solution for beginners and professionals
By Felix Liberman (felixl@rambler.ru)
English version editor: Uri Bruck (http://translation.israel.net)
Agenda
· Why Perl/Tk
Other languages/libraries
Comparison table
· Alternative visual tools for Perl/Tk
· What beginners need
· Why experienced programmer need it
· What VPTK offers
· Features that are not supported (yet)
· Demo
Why Perl/Tk
· We are familiar with Perl, so a new GUI environment
ramp-up should not take much effort
· Perl has big advantage against other languages it
requires significantly less development and debug effort
· Perl/Tk runs on all GUI-compatible platforms, so it could
be used when multiple platforms compatibility is critical
· We should consider that for really big GUI projects the
Perl interpreter limitations could become a bottleneck,
but contemporary HW/SW trends make this
consideration increasingly outdated
We use Perl mostly for console or web applications
development, while the GUI sector is already dominated by
GTK, QT and tcl/tk, so why does Perl/Tk still remain a good
alternative?
Why Perl/Tk (Comparison table)
Perl/Tk tcl/tk Perl GTK QT
Cross-platform + + ? +
Ready to run + + + +
Easy ramp-up + - + -
Development ? + + ?
automation
Alternative visual tools for Perl/Tk
· If our choice is Perl/Tk we need a good
tool for development automation
· There are many commercial solutions, but
most are oriented to MS Win
· Official CPAN project "ZooZ" appears to
be not quite ready for practical use
· "GLADE" and other open-source tools are
too general, can't produce instant code
and require a specific platform or
additional installations
What beginners need
· When starting to learn a new GUI development
package one wants to see what it offers and how
it "kicks" in real life (not in a book)
· Beginners surely won't be familiar with geometry
managers and numerous widget options but
need some practical way to learn them
· It's easier for a beginner to "play" with his design
interactively, without re-running the same
program thousands of times
· For a beginner it's important to see what
generated code looks like for future use of the
same tricks in "manual mode"
Why experienced programmers need it
· Experienced programmers also need a
visual environment for design automation:
For GUI sketching when working with
customers
For quicker development of small projects that
don't require special GUI tricks
For proof-of-concept experiments
For GUI project initial planning
What VPTK offers
· Free, easy to install tool that works in every place where
Perl/Tk installed
· Beginner-friendly context sensitive help based on Perl/Tk
documentation
· User-side code support (callbacks & global variables)
· Two output formats: ready-to-run executable and sub-
module code
· On-the-fly generated code preview and debug
· Geometry manager conflicts resolution (automatic)
· Undo/Redo
· Cut-'n'-Paste
Features that are not supported (yet)
· Non-static GUI tricks
· Balloons
· Lists/trees/tables contents
· Control over all widget's options
· Extended widgets set (like mega-widgets)
· Functional part before main loop
· Free input/output format
· Drag-'n'-drop interface
Download
You can download for free VPTK (widget edition) here:
· http://perltk.org/ => Scripts => General
· http://geocities.com/felixdaru/download/vptk_w.tgz
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