Slashdot: Perl Domination in CGI Programming?

[joel]

Mike Stanczyk wrote:

> Here's a question for you: Long time ago I used a gui builder program that
> was written in tcl/tk and generated tcl/tk code for the gui as you built it.
> Do you know of anything simlar that outputs perl/tk code?
>
> Mike
>
> On Thu, 4 Nov 1999, HoltryF wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
> > --
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > | Frank Holtry           | "If you have the right attitude, interesting       |
> > | fholtry at lucent.com     |  problems will find you."                          |
> > |                        |                            Eric S. Raymond         |
> > |                        |                                                    |
> > |                        |         "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"             |
> > |                        |       (http://earthspace.net/~esr/writings/        |
> > |                        |          cathedral-paper.html#toc13)               |
> > |                        |                                                    |
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >

Perl/Tk works GREAT. I have written a good-sized porftolio management system using
it, and (just for the hellofit)  have been able to get practically the entire thing
to run under Windoze with almost zero additional effort.
The toolkit itself doesn't appear to be quite as rich as Gtk, but there is constant
development of new widgets and additions to existing ones, and it is quite easy to
use. Plus, there is VERY little formal documentation on the Perl/Gtk interface.
For now, if you want to develop a gui app using Perl, Tk is the way to go.