[Phoenix-pm] UI Builder in Perl

[Scott Walters]

Hi Chris,

I don't know of anything that does this, but I wasn't aware that there was
a GUI builder for wx at all. I only knew about Glade. 

My money is always on integration. To use a near by analogy: There are entirely
too many windowing toolkits out there.. Tk, Gtk, wx, Prima, X11::Motif,
qt... probably some others I'm forgetting. Translating the
features of one application into an implementation in another
language creates more forks, more code to maintain, more "standards".
Tk was widely successful because people wrote bindings for
it for Scheme, Python, Perl, and even Java if I'm not mistaken.
This was good for Scheme, Python, and Perl (thought the Java camp
could care less). This in turn was good for Tk (again). 

I certainly understand the urge to take out the bulldozer and 
flatten my workspace before I start writing code, but there is a lot
of incentive to resist this uge. 

Specifically, your energies would be better spent, in my
opinion, improving the Perl integration, making it less C-ish and
more language netural, improving documentation so that other people
don't have to meddle in guts of other languages. This would involve
learning Python, but learning new languages is kind of fun and very
educational. The Python people did get a few things right.

Here's another story. Majordomo is old, crufty, and not that well
maintained. It's written in Perl. Mailman is new, and written by
a friend of mine who is a security fiend, but it's written in Python.
You may have noticed that the mail list changed recently from 
Majordomo to Mailman after what word of mouth says was a security
breech. This, for the Perl users group lists. Outrage? Or wisdom?

And another story. PHP has PEAR. Perl has CPAN. CPAN is hugely
valuable to Perl and a lot of the success of the language is
attributable to the producitivity boost CPAN brings. I'd love to
see glue in other languages so that you can use CPAN, much like
you can use Inline::Java to get at the AWT from Perl, or use
Win32::* to get at the GDI, or use Inline::C to get any any 
C library. Rather than the PHP camp making any sort of generic glue at all,
they decided to reimplement the best parts of CPAN. This probably sounded
like a perfectly reasonable idea to them, but you and I, with our understanding
of what CPAN is and it's massive scope, find this absurd. I know I do.

Okey, end rant. Mind you, I like to argue strongly for things that I
don't really feel very strongly about, and just because I have a 
page full of "reasons" that things should be done one way doesn't mean
I won't change my mind in my sleep tonight. So take this all with a grain
of salt. It's just my knee jerk reaction. If I tried really hard, I'm sure
I could make a convincing argument for rewriting it in Perl too ;)
So I hope this is at least food for thought.

Cheers,
-scott


On  0, Chris Krum <cakrum at cox.net> wrote:
> 
> I'm looking for a drag&drop UI builder for wxPerl that's written in 
> Perl. Any such animal out there? I've seen wxGlade and others that can 
> DO wxPerl but they're written in Python etc. so if I want to make 
> changes I'll have to learn a new language. Barring the existence of an 
> established project, would it be a worthwhile endeavour to start my 
> own?
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Phoenix-pm mailing list
> Phoenix-pm at pm.org
> http://www.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/phoenix-pm