On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 8:29 PM, Karl Glazebrook <[email protected]> wrote: > Sorry I have not been following the threads on Prima. > > Is Prima ready for prime time?
Certainly Prima, the GUI toolkit, is ready for prime time. My plotting library has identified a few interesting corner-case bugs, but in large part I'd say that Prima itself is pretty solid. > I recall some people complaining about installation issues. True we have > that for PGPLOT but at least we have all the basic plotting already covered. There have been installation issues in the past. Thanks to my improved knowledge of setting build and runtime requirements in Build.PL, and thanks to Rob and Dmitry's work squashing a weird library loading issue, the installation issues appear to be pretty much under control. Now we're just waiting for Dmitry's release of Prima 1.35. (And, Dmitry has found some postscript output bugs; I suspect that he's waiting to release 1.35 until I've confirmed that he's fixed those bugs.) The main missing piece at this point is documentation for the plotting library. There is documentation, but there must be more before it's ready to be taken as the main plotting library. Addressing the documentation shortage for PDL::Graphics::Prima is precisely what I need to do for the next point release by September, and P::G::Prima will only be the default plotting library if I manage to get those docs written. > Does the GUI look modern? It looks dated, but in my opinion it's a small price to pay for a GUI toolkit that works everywhere. I've learned a bit more about Tk and I believe that it would have been an almost equivalent toolkit choice (though I suspect the internals are not nearly as graceful), but its widgets look just as dated as Prima's. Gtk, Qt, and Wx are not viable due to the difficulty of CPAN installation (and for the case of Qt, lack of good Perl bindings). My hope is that if there is enough demand for new looking widgets, somebody will step up and implement a new set of widgets, possibly using the PDL drawing methods if the rendering gets more involved and they need greater speed. David -- "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
