Perl GUI programming on Windows

Question

I\'m looking for tools for Perl GUI programming on Windows for educational/in-house development, mostly science related.

My first choice was PerlQt. A friend of mine was

Answer 1

Self promo for my perl module IUP :

• it uses native widgets (= your app will have native look&feel)
• it is also slightly cross-platform (Win32, GTK, Motif)

Answer 2

For real cross platform GUI programming I would suggest Prima or Tk. Neither look great, but they work.

Still, I think you might be better served (hehe) by using a web front-end than a true GUI these days; this is easy using a web-framework. I would suggest Mojolicious though other people do like Dancer. My primary reason for suggesting Mojo over Dancer is that Mojo comes with lots of functionality in one tiny package. Then again, this is the reason that others would recommend Dancer, so that's a toss.

A final consideration is that Mojo comes with WebSockets out of the box. This makes it rather easy for your webapp to feel more like a true application, talking back to the server and getting responses without reloading.

Edit: I now have a good example of a desktop application written with a Perl/Mojo backend and a web-frontent: Azawawi's Farabi. It is a text-editor, geared towards writing Perl. It's GUI is the browser, making it a simple cross-platform editor. I recommend it as a starting point for similar tasks.

Answer 3

There is an outdated Perl GUI FAQ on perlmonks.

PerlQt tracks Qt closely.

Answer 4

Here is a good overview of widget toolkits- many of which provide wrappers to popular programming languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_widget_toolkits

I recommend [wxwidgets][1] aka wxwindows, or a browser based solution (e.g. XULrunner) or a pure Javascript+HTML5 based solution. At the moment I am working on a cross-platform tool with only a basic console UI, which then uses websockets and HTML5 + SVG for a more complex UI rendition and UX. To make the web-content dynamic I use a simple template-engine.

( Personally, for overview questions, I had good experience to put the term wikipedia and list of somewhere in the search query of ones trusted search engine. Kudos to the diligent wikipedia community.)

Answer 5

I have an experience with PerlTk and wxPerl. wxPerl is rather decent toolkit which I can recommend. There is also a GUI builder available wxGlade

The few applications I had in Tk taught me to hate that toolkit wholeheartedly:

1. it looks awful
2. disproportional amount of coding time was spent on solving various bugs and finding workarounds for missing features

Answer 6

Hta, HTML application, mshta.exe... Old but works like a charm. Pros: Total access to basically everything you could want for development of in-house trusted apps. Cons: Geometry gets tedious, perlscript (vs vbscript/javascript) documentation/examples are basically nonexistent