GUI development solution for beginners and professionals By Felix Liberman (felixl@rambler.ru) English version editor: Uri Bruck (http://translation.israel.net)
· 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
· 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interpreter limitations could become a bottleneck, but contemporary HW/SW trends make this consideration increasingly outdated We use Perl mostly for console or web applications development, while the GUI sector is already dominated by GTK, QT and tcl/tk, so why does Perl/Tk still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?
Perl/Tk tcl/tk Perl GTK QT Cross-platform + + ? + Ready to run + + + + Easy ramp-up + - + - Development ? + + ? automation
· 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
· 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"
· 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
· 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 · Functional part before main loop · Balloons
· Bindings · Non-static GUI tricks · Lists/trees/tables contents · Control over all widget's options · Extended widgets set (like mega-widgets) · Free input/output format · Drag-'n'-drop interface
You can download for free VPTK (widget edition) here: · http://perltk.org/ => Scripts => General · http://geocities.com/felixdaru/download/vptk_w.tgz
1 POD Error
The following errors were encountered while parsing the POD:
Non-ASCII character seen before =encoding in '·'. Assuming CP1252
To install vptk_w::Project, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm vptk_w::Project
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install vptk_w::Project
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.