[KLUG Members] No perl experts out there have worked with Tk?

[Mike Slack]

Adam Williams (adam@morrison-ind.com) wrote:
> >I've never used Perl/Tk.  I've never heard anyone say many good things
> >about it.
> >I have used Gtk-Perl, which works pretty nicely, though you need to be
> >able to read the Gtk+ documentation (written in C), and translate into
> >the appropriate calls in Perl.  For Perl programmers, Gtk-Perl seems
> >to have more of a future than Perl/Tk.  For the unfamiliar, Gtk+ is
> >the Gimp toolkit, which is quite popular for doing GUI C programming
> >on Linux (including of course, the Gimp itself).  There isn't really
> >any active work on the Gtk+ for Windows.
> 
> ?  We use quite a few gtk apps on Windows: Dia, xsane, etc...


Really?  I had the impression that development of GTK on Windows had dried
up.  Perhaps I've missed something there.  Certainly GTK work on X Windows 
platforms is quite active.



> >If you are interested in GUI/scripting in general, I think the best
> >solution is wxPython, which is a combination of Python and wxWindows.
> 
> Played with that.  Personally I didn't like wxWindows.  And we should get
> Mr. Raymond to add YAWS to the hacker dictionary.  YAWS = Yet another widget
> set.  We have MFC, Qt, GTK, and Motif.  Most UNIX systems support all the
> last three.  Having to load YAWS is irritating and really burns up RAM
> (otherwise at least all Qt apps share libqt.so or qt.dll, etc...).  V, X
> Forms, etc... are all slowly withering away; let them - IMHO.


Well, you need to keep in mind that wxWindows is not really another widget
set.  It uses already existing ones (there are versions that use GTK+, MFC, 
Motif, MAC OS), and provides a uniform interface to all the widget sets it supports.
You do need to be willing to work with its API.  I don't find it to be any
more difficult to learn than GTK+, MFC, or any other GUI API that I've seen.
 


> >I've done a few significant projects with wxPython, with good success.
> >Python is much easier to use than Perl (and no, I am not an anti-Perl
> 
> Yes, I like python.  Coming from C it is more familiar than Perl,  and
> *golly* is there anything it can't do to XML.
> 
> >bigot -- I actually like Perl a lot), especially for large projects,
> >and wxWindows is a very nice (free) cross platform GUI toolkit, written
> >in C++, with a Python binding.  With wxPython, you can even create
> >binaries for Linux and Windows from the same Python code, a very nice
> >feature.  It's also not too hard to port the Python code to C++ if
> >you want to squeeze out the extra performance down the road.  There
> >is also a wxPerl project, though I don't think it has nearly the same
> >benefits and support as wxPython.
> 
> I'd recommend GTK, which has both a good perl and python binding library.
> It has proven to be nicely cross platform for us.

I can't really argue with this choice, especially if GTK apps really do
work well on Windows.

-- 
Mike Slack
mike@slacking.org
--
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't
be called research, would it?" --Albert Einstein