Have any great advances been made with a perl gui which can be used on multiple platforms?
At LinuxWorld I saw through 10 minute demo of Active State's Komodo (which, by the way, was being done by a PHP developer - even Active State is starting to drift away from Perl it seems), which integrates with their Perl Development Kit (PDK), that includes both a GUI builder and tools for creating stand-alone executables.
But the guy doing the demo was quick to admit that the GUI builder was primitive. You could say the same about open source tools for Tk. Most of these tools don't even come close to what was available in (cough, cough) Visual Basic in the early '90's.
(At the January BLU meeting Novell presented a demo of some of the things they're working on, including Mono (open source .NET) and related tools. Even they weren't satisfied with the available open source GTk GUI builder and were working on a replacement.)
A friend was watching the Komodo demo with me, who has recently been coming up to speed on Eclipse, using it to do J2EE programming. He was quick to notice that Komodo lacked the kind of automation shortcuts, like adding in 'use' statements, or taking care of other coding drudgery.
I was skeptical that such things actually added to one's programming efficiency. My friend wasn't an IDE junkie. He spent plenty of years working on the command line and with text editors. His opinion was that these bits of automation really did help, and the lack of them in Komodo made it seem way behind the curve.
Most long time Perl programmers will scoff at IDEs, but the lack of tools is part of the problem of Perl not being accepted by the corporate IT community. Of course it is also a catch-22. Without a critical mass of users, there isn't a financial incentive for companies to develop such tools. Whether open source plug-ins for Eclipse can bridge the gap, who knows. (Thanks to Duane Bronson for mentioning that there is a Perl plug-in for Eclipse. I had been wondering, and asked a few people, but wasn't aware that it existed.)
Perl has a lot of technical challenges to overcome before it'll be a good tool for creating client-side GUI programs (perhaps Perl 6 might change that), but that has never been one of its strengths and I don't think it needs to become one in order to be successful in corporate IT departments. Consider Java in the servlets context or PHP.
Sean Quinlan wrote:
But who is supporting PHP?
Active State, Zend, and the zillions of web hosting companies that provide PHP-enabled web servers.
(I'm sure that list would be longer if I actually used PHP.)
-Tom
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