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I'd like to write some interactive GUIs in Perl. I've used TclTk but it looks dated. I've written QT code for C++, but the PerlTk module hasn't had a release in several years. Googling around I see other possible options.
What are good packages for this, including basic windowing, menus, drawing canvas, scrollbars, and so on.
Gtk2 has glade2 which can write out an XML file usable by Gtk2::GladeXML. Here is an example of how to bundle the XML with the app in the same file.
I misread the question at first. I thought you wanted a GUI editor for making GUIs (which is what glade2 is). You can also create GUIs using Gtk2 without glade2:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Gtk2;
Gtk2->init;
my $window = Gtk2::Window->new;
my $vbox = Gtk2::VBox->new;
my $label = Gtk2::Label->new("Hello World");
my $button = Gtk2::Button->new("Press me");
$window->add($vbox);
$vbox->add($label);
$vbox->add($button);
$window->set_default_size(200, 200);
$window->signal_connect(
destroy => sub {
Gtk2->main_quit;
}
);
my $i = 0;
$button->signal_connect(
clicked => sub {
$label->set_text("button pressed " . ++$i . " times");
}
);
$window->show_all;
Gtk2->main;
Try wxPerl!
From the web site:
wxPerl is an extension module allowing
the creation of GUI (Graphical User
Interface) from Perl; it is built as a
wrapper for the awesome wxWidgets C++
GUI toolkit.
Echoing Chas Owens, glade is quite usable with Gtk2 in Perl. In addition, Gtk2 also supports GtkBuilder files (which you can create the latest glade too).
The main problem with wxPerl (and wxWidgets itself) is that it doesn't let you install file event watchers into its main loop (it only has GUI, Socket and Timer events), unlike Tk and Gtk.
The Qt, Tk and Gtk2 event loops can be used in Perl with AnyEvent, and Gtk2 can be hooked into applications running the Event or Ev mainloop with Glib::Event and Glib::EV modules.
A GUI builder for WxPerl would be wxGlade or wxFormBuilder, both open-source.
I would probably use Gtk2, but Tk is definitely not dead. The lack of releases is due to the bugs being ironed out over the years. A lot of people still use it, and it generally works fine. (Tk's event loop is somewhat silly, but that is a detail that probably shouldn't concern you.) The only disadvantage is that your GUI looks like it is from 1996, but who cares?
(The gitk tool included with git showed that Tk GUIs look fine as long as they're useful.)
Recently I was made aware of another GUI toolkit for Perl called Prima. Its claim to fame is that it was written in C especially for Perl, not a port from TCL or bindings to something else. Assuming you have some rather standard libraries on your system, it will install directly from CPAN and its cross-platform!
David Mertens has been writing a new plotting library for PDL using it, and a REPL too!
Regarding quality of widgets, all three gtk2, wx and qt4 are equally good -- gtk2 is fastest, qt4 has best resolution, whereas wx is somewhere between the two in terms of both the parameters.
But tk is behind all the three both in terms of speed and resolution, but remains firstly because it is the original widget for all unix based interpreted languages, and secondly because it is native-widget of freebsd.
As on today in case of perl, documentation of perl-gtk2 is slightly more developed than both perl-qt4 which is in turn is more developed than wxperl. In fact, if you browse the web, you will find that tutorials for perl-gtk2 is more extensively available than even pygtk (which is also very well established) and ruby-gtk2. In case of python, wxpython documentation leads over PyQt and pygtk, whereas in case of ruby, ruby-qt4 leads over ruby-gtk2 and wxruby. However, others are developing very fast (e.g. ruby-gtk2) and after some time all nine will be equal in all aspects.
The perl-qt4 specific problem is: In case of non-kde desktops, perl-qt4 may not run. I tried running all in ubuntu and sabayon and found that perl-gtk2 and even wxperl (and wxruby also) runs fine whereas I'm not able to run even a single perl-qt4 programs in gnome-desktop where I have installed complete qt4 support without kde.
perl-qt4 asks for installation of not just qt4-libraries, but also kde-desktop libraries. This problem is uniquely perl-qt4-specific, does not exist in case of PyQt and rubyqt4 since they both run fine with qt4 runtime under gnome.
Hence, in this way eight (plus three tk) out of nine options did well (I havent tested PySide yet).
In case of perl-tk, widget is well developed and established and unlike tkinter, pmw and rubytk, its documentation is the best among all of these mentioned above.
But maybe after some time all the documentations become developed and any would become equally good.
After taking a balance between speed, clarity and cross-platform into consideration choose either perl-gtk2, or perl-qt4 or wxperl.
perl-tk, perl-gtk2 and perl-qt4 syntaxes nicely go well with perl programming language syntax, whereas wxperl syntax look more like proper c++ blended into perl which is different from the respective language syntax (just like in case of wxpython and wxruby).
But if you are already keeping in mind that wx code is uniquely different then you can straightaway begin with wxperl.
Otherwise, best way out is: begin with perl-tk, then switch over to perl-gtk2 then perl-qt4 or wxperl alike but make sure that you learn all four instead of only one (the same sequence should also apply to python and ruby too despite the fact that documentation support is reverse, but in case of perl even for this aspect it is same).
I don't have a real answer for you, but often you have to consider your deployment targets. Some of the GUI libraries are very nice, but only if you can get them to work on your operating system. I don't necessarily think that all frameworks need to be cross-platform compatible, a very laudable goal to work toward in a perfect world, as long as the one you choose doesn't lock out a significant portion of your users because the foundation GUIs libraries are hard to install or support on a particular platform.
I just want to let everyone know PerlQt is great and this site has a lot of tutorials on how to use it and lots of examples to download.
PerlQt Wiki tutorial
PerlQt is a very fast and easy way to create great looking GUI programs using the Qt drag and drop form designer and Perl. PerlQt is powerful enough for advanced developers and easy for beginners as well.
The solution I'm going with is Gtk-Perl. At first I had difficulty installing it, but in the end I found Camelbox Perl+Gtk2 in one package.
I have used Tk, but in the last few days I have been playing around with Continuity (CPAN entry), a stateful (persistent state per user) web application/server, and it could easily be a way to add "GUI" features into an application, while making it multi-user and portable at the same time.
Edit: At the time I wrote this, I was most interested in the fact that Continuity had its own built-in webserver. This is now true of other webframeworks for Perl as well. I have been using Mojolicious though I hear good things about Dancer too.
I have a bunch of related Perl scripts that I would like to put together in one convenient place. So I was thinking of building a GUI and incorporating the scripts. I'm using Strawberry Perl on Windows XP and have just installed Tk from cpan about fifteen minutes ago. Before I go for it, I want some sound advice either for or against it.
My other option is to translate the Perl scripts into VB and use Visual Studio 2008, but that might be too much hassle for an outcome that might end up all the same had I just stuck with Perl & Tk.
I haven't looked yet, but maybe there is a module for Visual Studio that would allow me to invoke Perl scripts?
The main requirements are:
It must be able to communicate with MySQL
It must be able to fetch & parse XML files from the internet
It must be transportable, scalable, and sustainable
What direction would you take?
I've built Perl/Tk apps on Windows before and found it just fine, including using PAR to package everything up for distribution to others. It was nice being able to do most of my development on a proper Linux system and have things just magically work on Windows :) The only gotcha I encountered is that Tk doesn't play well with ithreads.
I personally would recommend wxPerl over Tk. It has native looking widgets, at least in my view leads to cleaner code and you can use wxGlade as a GUI designer.
If you haven't programmed with Perl/Tk I would think that Tkx (developed by Activestate) would be a better option. Tkx is a thin layer over Tcl/Tk, which gives it access to the new themed widgets in Tcl/Tk so your application would look better.
Perl/Tk has a lot more documentation around, but the module itself does not seem to be developed anymore. The documentation for Tkx is very sparse but by following the Tkx tutorial files on CPAN, it should be easy to get started.
WxWidgets (available for Perl via wxPerl) is an excellent graphical toolkit, but wxPerl only implements a subset of the available widgets.
PAR is convenient but if you go with Perl/Tk, the result will not run natively on OS X. (Users will need to run X11 first, which is problematic, especially with more recent version of OS X). If you go with Tkx, you can get native application on Mac OSX. Also, ActiveStates's PDK gives you a simple way to package everything to deploy to Windows, Linux, and OS X.
For reference, see the the software (AntConc and AntWordProfiler) at the following site http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html, where AntConc was developed using Perl/Tk and AntWordProfiler was developed using Tkx.
The Process class allows to start new processes from a C# (WPF/Winforms) frontend.
I guess that way you can keep your Perl scripts and use the nice Visual Studio GUI builder.
I am working on an academic research regarding some very long functions in the Linux kernel (link, link).
For that research, I would like to use some code flow visualization tool, that would be able to plot a graph in which each vertex is a decision point and each edge is a piece of code which runs in a consequent way.
Do you know of any good, open source project that can visualize C code?
Perhaps a tool like KCacheGrind would be of help. It generates call graphs based on actual calls and cannot pre-generate a call graph without actually running the program, which may not suit your needs, but then it again it may.
History flow's are very neat for changes/diff across multiple versions.
Codeplex has a project, Dependency Visualizer which does support C also.
Gprof2Dot can render oprofile, this would get you dynamic info also.
CodeViz also (static tool) would work.
If your using gcc, gcc-xml has an introspector plugin also todo this.
You appears to want to acquire a flowchart of C source code ("decisions", "code blocks").
Something like this C flowchart?
To do this correctly, esp. for Linux kernal code, I'd expect you to have to preprocess the code first to get rid of macros and conditionals. I would assume that GCC would construct such a graph internally and that you ought to be able to get your hands on that graph.
Doxygen does some amount of 'visualization',
but you need to work on the code a bit for it to be usable.
Another interesting thing to check would be lxr
Linux Cross Referencer is a software toolset for indexing and presenting source code repositories. LXR was initially targeted at the Linux source code, but has proved usable for a wide range of software projects. lxr.linux.no is currently running an experimental fork of the LXR software.
I can recommend Sourcetrail. Can work with a compile_commands.json. Not sure if it's still maintained, though. But it's foss and you can fork it!
I'd like to write some interactive GUIs in Perl. I've used TclTk but it looks dated. I've written QT code for C++, but the PerlTk module hasn't had a release in several years. Googling around I see other possible options.
What are good packages for this, including basic windowing, menus, drawing canvas, scrollbars, and so on.
Gtk2 has glade2 which can write out an XML file usable by Gtk2::GladeXML. Here is an example of how to bundle the XML with the app in the same file.
I misread the question at first. I thought you wanted a GUI editor for making GUIs (which is what glade2 is). You can also create GUIs using Gtk2 without glade2:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Gtk2;
Gtk2->init;
my $window = Gtk2::Window->new;
my $vbox = Gtk2::VBox->new;
my $label = Gtk2::Label->new("Hello World");
my $button = Gtk2::Button->new("Press me");
$window->add($vbox);
$vbox->add($label);
$vbox->add($button);
$window->set_default_size(200, 200);
$window->signal_connect(
destroy => sub {
Gtk2->main_quit;
}
);
my $i = 0;
$button->signal_connect(
clicked => sub {
$label->set_text("button pressed " . ++$i . " times");
}
);
$window->show_all;
Gtk2->main;
Try wxPerl!
From the web site:
wxPerl is an extension module allowing
the creation of GUI (Graphical User
Interface) from Perl; it is built as a
wrapper for the awesome wxWidgets C++
GUI toolkit.
Echoing Chas Owens, glade is quite usable with Gtk2 in Perl. In addition, Gtk2 also supports GtkBuilder files (which you can create the latest glade too).
The main problem with wxPerl (and wxWidgets itself) is that it doesn't let you install file event watchers into its main loop (it only has GUI, Socket and Timer events), unlike Tk and Gtk.
The Qt, Tk and Gtk2 event loops can be used in Perl with AnyEvent, and Gtk2 can be hooked into applications running the Event or Ev mainloop with Glib::Event and Glib::EV modules.
A GUI builder for WxPerl would be wxGlade or wxFormBuilder, both open-source.
I would probably use Gtk2, but Tk is definitely not dead. The lack of releases is due to the bugs being ironed out over the years. A lot of people still use it, and it generally works fine. (Tk's event loop is somewhat silly, but that is a detail that probably shouldn't concern you.) The only disadvantage is that your GUI looks like it is from 1996, but who cares?
(The gitk tool included with git showed that Tk GUIs look fine as long as they're useful.)
Recently I was made aware of another GUI toolkit for Perl called Prima. Its claim to fame is that it was written in C especially for Perl, not a port from TCL or bindings to something else. Assuming you have some rather standard libraries on your system, it will install directly from CPAN and its cross-platform!
David Mertens has been writing a new plotting library for PDL using it, and a REPL too!
Regarding quality of widgets, all three gtk2, wx and qt4 are equally good -- gtk2 is fastest, qt4 has best resolution, whereas wx is somewhere between the two in terms of both the parameters.
But tk is behind all the three both in terms of speed and resolution, but remains firstly because it is the original widget for all unix based interpreted languages, and secondly because it is native-widget of freebsd.
As on today in case of perl, documentation of perl-gtk2 is slightly more developed than both perl-qt4 which is in turn is more developed than wxperl. In fact, if you browse the web, you will find that tutorials for perl-gtk2 is more extensively available than even pygtk (which is also very well established) and ruby-gtk2. In case of python, wxpython documentation leads over PyQt and pygtk, whereas in case of ruby, ruby-qt4 leads over ruby-gtk2 and wxruby. However, others are developing very fast (e.g. ruby-gtk2) and after some time all nine will be equal in all aspects.
The perl-qt4 specific problem is: In case of non-kde desktops, perl-qt4 may not run. I tried running all in ubuntu and sabayon and found that perl-gtk2 and even wxperl (and wxruby also) runs fine whereas I'm not able to run even a single perl-qt4 programs in gnome-desktop where I have installed complete qt4 support without kde.
perl-qt4 asks for installation of not just qt4-libraries, but also kde-desktop libraries. This problem is uniquely perl-qt4-specific, does not exist in case of PyQt and rubyqt4 since they both run fine with qt4 runtime under gnome.
Hence, in this way eight (plus three tk) out of nine options did well (I havent tested PySide yet).
In case of perl-tk, widget is well developed and established and unlike tkinter, pmw and rubytk, its documentation is the best among all of these mentioned above.
But maybe after some time all the documentations become developed and any would become equally good.
After taking a balance between speed, clarity and cross-platform into consideration choose either perl-gtk2, or perl-qt4 or wxperl.
perl-tk, perl-gtk2 and perl-qt4 syntaxes nicely go well with perl programming language syntax, whereas wxperl syntax look more like proper c++ blended into perl which is different from the respective language syntax (just like in case of wxpython and wxruby).
But if you are already keeping in mind that wx code is uniquely different then you can straightaway begin with wxperl.
Otherwise, best way out is: begin with perl-tk, then switch over to perl-gtk2 then perl-qt4 or wxperl alike but make sure that you learn all four instead of only one (the same sequence should also apply to python and ruby too despite the fact that documentation support is reverse, but in case of perl even for this aspect it is same).
I don't have a real answer for you, but often you have to consider your deployment targets. Some of the GUI libraries are very nice, but only if you can get them to work on your operating system. I don't necessarily think that all frameworks need to be cross-platform compatible, a very laudable goal to work toward in a perfect world, as long as the one you choose doesn't lock out a significant portion of your users because the foundation GUIs libraries are hard to install or support on a particular platform.
I just want to let everyone know PerlQt is great and this site has a lot of tutorials on how to use it and lots of examples to download.
PerlQt Wiki tutorial
PerlQt is a very fast and easy way to create great looking GUI programs using the Qt drag and drop form designer and Perl. PerlQt is powerful enough for advanced developers and easy for beginners as well.
The solution I'm going with is Gtk-Perl. At first I had difficulty installing it, but in the end I found Camelbox Perl+Gtk2 in one package.
I have used Tk, but in the last few days I have been playing around with Continuity (CPAN entry), a stateful (persistent state per user) web application/server, and it could easily be a way to add "GUI" features into an application, while making it multi-user and portable at the same time.
Edit: At the time I wrote this, I was most interested in the fact that Continuity had its own built-in webserver. This is now true of other webframeworks for Perl as well. I have been using Mojolicious though I hear good things about Dancer too.
Being really new to wx, I'm wondering if there is an IDE (especially for Linux) which would help me lay out a frame or dialog or whatever just to help me see what I'm doing. That means also creating the code for those changes.
I remember way back when using resource compilers for OS/2 and Windows that produced binaries that would then create the window, and was hoping for something similar (though obviously not binary if wx doesn't support that).
I use wxFormBuilder. It is written in wxWidgets, so it works on Linux quite well. It can generate C++ code or XRC files. Make sure you understand its philosophy, and use it like this:
generate C++ code for the GUI
don't edit the code wxFormBuilder generated, but create new files
in new files, derive new classes from the classes it generated
implement event handlers in you own class (wxFB creates virtual function for each event handler you wish to use)
I usually name the wxFormBuilder generated classes/files like, for example, MainFrameGUI, and one with implementation (derived one in which I write all my code) would be just MainFrame. This enables you to change the visual layout and regenerate C++ files from wxFB at any time without overwriting your code.
DialogBlocks works quite well for me, although sometimes you need to edit the code to fix errors manually. It has a property editor that seems advanced enough.
Just another options is wxGlade. It does not have the that much features as the others mentioned seem to have, but it works just good enough for me to not daring to switch.
I use Code::Blocks IDE from http://www.codeblocks.org which has
- built-in GUI editor
- Cross compilable, so you can use it under Linux, OSX and Windows.
But I still use wxFormBuilder with it instead of built-in wxSmith editor. But they are compatible with internal wxSmith.
For windows you've got "wx-devcpp" which is Blodsheed Dev C++ with some addons providing what you looking for
Here is project page
http://wxdsgn.sourceforge.net/