[Phoenix-pm] UI Builder in Perl

[Chris Krum]

Funny, I've been lurking on this list for some time now and I've never 
seen you show any propensity for argumentation. ;-) You always seem so 
quiet and reserved.

But seriously. What do you mean by "improving the Perl integration"? 
Are you referring to the integration of Perl and Wx or the ability of 
wxGlade to generate Perl code?

I guess the thing I have against tools written in one language 
generating code in another is that something is always lost in 
translation. Like the saying goes "Nothing does perl like perl." Take 
the new perl plug-in for Eclipse. Great idea, but I would imagine that 
there is a lot of perl syntax that a Java framework won't be able to 
deal with. Maybe I'm wrong but I think that anyone using Eclipse to 
write perl code will need to avoid most of the more interesting 
syntactic sugar because Java won't know what to do with it.

And that brings me to another of your points. The idea of "glue in 
other languages" to allow them to use perl code sounds good, but I 
don't think anything short of embedding a full perl interpreter is 
going to work. I don't imagine that's what you had in mind. Are you 
aware of any languages that have actually embedded perl? I seem to 
remember that M$ promised that the CRL would allow you to run any 
language but that when someone tried to create an interpreter for perl 
they had trouble with the fact that it was dynamically typed.

No rant intended. Just juxtaposing myself. (And man did it hurt!)

Anyway, all I'm really looking for is a perl project to help me keep my 
experience up. I almost never get to write in perl anymore.

Well, thanks for listening.
Chris.

On Jun 18, 2004, at 8:02 PM, Scott Walters wrote:

> 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.
>>
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