Siegfried Heintze wrote:
I get the impression that there are several alternatives to use=ing Tk for writing OS neutral GUI programs in Perl.
Can anyone point me to a discussion that might help me choose one?
I'll give my vote to Gtk2 any day.
To start with, Tk looks like barf. It really, really, looks bad. Gtk2 has a large selection of widgets and excellent theming support. If you want people to smile when your application starts instead of frowning, use Gtk2. For Linux users, you have the added bonus of your application looking like the rest of their Gtk2 applications.
Next, Gtk2 is being actively developed. While I don't have any on-depth knowledge of Tk, my impression is that it's pretty static.
While I concede that there are probably more users of Perl-Tk than Gtk2-Perl, the support in the Gtk2-Perl forum is excellent. As for bugs, I've only ever stumbled across *one* bug, and it was fixed months before I came across it ... I just hadn't updated yet.
OS support is pretty good for Gtk2. It obviously works well on Linux. There are installers for Gtk-2.6.7 ( or something like that ) for Windows, with a bundled theme switcher and a large selection of themes. Gtk2 works well under Windows - not quite as fast as under Linux, but otherwise I haven't hit any bugs. OS-X users can use Fink to install Gtk2. One of the Gtk2-Perl uses a Powerbook as a development box. I also have a Powerbook, but I use Darwin Ports, and their Gtk2 ports aren't quite as good as Fink. I will be moving to Fink soon ... but anyway, *apparently* it works perfectly well if you install via fink. OS-X users will also have to be running an X server, which slows things down a bit. Unfortunately there's no native port of Gtk2 for OS-X.
Glade ( the Gtk2 WYSIWYG builder ) is also a pleasure to work with.
As you might guess, I like Gtk2-Perl. I'm porting our database front-ends from MS Access to Gtk2-Perl at work. I have 2 systems complete rolled out, and I'm immensely happy with the results. I wrote Gtk2::Ex::DBI ( see http://entropy.homelinux.org ... which is a little broken after a botched php upgrade, but still usable ... or fetch via cpan ) to bind a DBI recordset to widgets on a Glade-generated form.
Anyway, enough of Gtk2 :) There's also Perl-QT. I looked at it briefly before choosing Gtk2-Perl. I simply don't like QT and it's themes. I don't run KDE and don't pay too much attention to what they're doing. QT has been ported to a lot of systems, including Windows and OS X. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the Perl bindings compiled or whether there are binary packages available.
So back to Gtk2. Use it. It rocks.
Dan
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