At 17|55 +0200 2002/04/07, Thomas De Groote wrote: >for a couple of years now just to develop CGIs that eventually run on a >linux box, I started to wonder what you guys really use MacPerl for. I >mean, MacPerl is more than Perl, otherwise this list wouldn't exist. What >kind of apps do you make with it?
A while ago I started doing some freelance website work, and I thought 'I need to learn Perl'. I use a Mac, so I went to get MacPerl, and all the helpful docs that come with it, and learnt Perl by reading the manual (to start with, that is). So I started writing some very simple CGIs - wrote/checked them on the mac, then uploaded to a unix web host. What I use it for now: I've used MacPerl to catalogue my MP3s (with File::Find and, hm, MP3::Info??), query the CDDB, find anagrams, do web spidering, isolate UU-encoded text, create .htpasswd files, generate web pages from data files, cat arbitrary files together, and develop and benchmark an assortment of modules from work (which run on Solaris systems and sometimes even on ActiveState Perl). Basically, I use perl to do pretty much any kind of real programming on the mac (and little noddy programs too), unless I have some particular reason to use C. I've also done a couple of 'hello world' style CGI scripts for use with WebStar, mainly to see how easy it was. It was _very_ easy. What I think is great about MacPerl is that it's perl(1) _aswell as_ a text editor, and integrated help, and a way to create droplets/runtimes/CGIs, and a load of MacOS-specific calls all bundled together. OK, owing to the limitations of MacOS it doesn't fork() and some other Unixish features are not there, but that doesn't bother me too much[2] and it's not MacPerl's fault. >Also, is there somewhere a quick and dirty tutorial available that shows >you how to make a window and some objects for it? This way I could also >start making *real* MacPerl apps. I've always got by with the sort of thing you get from MacPerl.pm - like Ask, Answer, SetFileInfo etc. All very useful and pretty user friendly. E.g. double-click on a droplet and very quickly[1] you get dialogs like 'Pick the file you want to do foo with' or 'enter the magic word' or whatever. But I guess you want something that looks like a real MacOS application as written in C/Pascal/whatever. P [1] I notice that MacPerl 5.6.1 boots up a great deal faster than 5.004. And it seems to execute faster too. [2] Although I wonder if MacOS can actually fork a process off, in some way or other, but it's annoyingly not _quite_ like Unix fork. I mean, threads have been in MacOS since at least OS 8.6, judging by the thing called 'ThreadsLib' in the Extensions folder, so maybe it's possible to do _something_ that looks like forking.
