Slashdot: Perl Domination in CGI Programming?

[HoltryF]

On Nov 3,  8:42am, Jason Wells wrote:
> Boy Mozart wrote:
> 
> > It's hard to follow sometimes, like the comments one
> > poster made that Perl isn't a "CGI language"--which it seems perfectly
> > suited for--and that it's "weak in areas such as GUI development".  I
> > don't understand the reference to GUI here.
> 
> The reference was to one of Perl's percieved shortcommings - the ability to
> write complex user interfaces.  It's actually pretty easy using the Perl/Tk
> extension.  I'm not sure how popular that extension is though.  Tk syntax
> resembles Tcl much more than Perl and I would guess it's more popular.
> 
> Does Perl/Tk development keep up with new releases of Tk?

I've been following the development of Perl/Tk for more than two years,now.
It's one of the more active areas of Perl development.  It does indeed keep
up with Tcl/Tk, but is a complete port to Perl.  That is, all the Tcl code
is replaced either by Perl or by C.  I would take some exception to the
statement that the syntaxes are tcl'ish.  Actually, they're Perl object
and hash reference notation.  Most of the widgets and most of their options
would be familiar to Tcl/Tk users, but this is an area where divergence is
beginning to happen.  New widgets are appearing frequently and new options are
added to old widgets on occasion.  The current release is Tk800.015, based on 
the Ousterhout Tk8.

For those who are interested, there's a public mailing list for Perl/Tk at
ptk at lists.stanford.edu.  There is also a useful O'Reilly publication "Learning
Perl/Tk" by Nancy Walsh.  

There's an excellent graphical Perl debugger, ptkdb, written in Perl/Tk, that's
available from http://world.std.com/~aep/ptkdb.

And one final thought: ActiveState (www.activestate.com) provides a Tk for 
their Perl for Win-doze.  But the Tk available from CPAN will now build with
VC++ nmake and seems to work better for me.  Either way, you get native
windows and virtually complete application portability.


> -Jason
> 
> 
> 
>-- End of excerpt from Jason Wells

Frank Holtry

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