Re: Roadmap; future file format changes

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On September 23, 2002 06:49 pm, Ed Avis wrote:

> - Tk.  We know about this one.  It's available on the platforms that
>   matter, although butt-ugly on some of them.  Certainly the most
>   expertise and familiarity (perl/Tk has its own newsgroup).

It's ugly by default, but you can skin it, at least in Python. I have a book 
on the Python bindings.

It's not skinned, but you should look at PySol. It looks really nice under 
Windows and *NIX.


> - GTK.  Works well on Linux; GTK is certainly available for Windows,
>   but I don't know if anyone has gotten the Perl bindings
>   working on that platform.  The L&F on Unix is nice (I use mostly GTK
>   applications) and on Windows is tolerable (you can configure it to
>   look like native widgets).  But can we build Windows exes with it?

GTK 1 is terrible if you want to use non-us charsets. It didn't even like 
french accented characters when I used it. Other than that it's pretty simple 
to learn. GTK 2 is supposed to be better but it's not universally available. 
The Perl bindings don't seem to be up-to-date, either: 
ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gtk/perl


> - Qt.  This has a 'native' look on Windows as well as being one of the
>   major two X11 toolkits (with GTK).  Same questions as for GTK: how
>   well do the Perl bindings work, do they work on Windows?  The
>   Windows version of Qt is under a semi-free licence, that shouldn't
>   be a problem since I'd give an exemption from the GPL for code that
>   I wrote to link it to Qt.

The Windows version of Qt is free-as-in-beer as long as your code is free. It 
handles i18n like a champ and the text boxes are really nice, because they 
accept and display HTML markup. Qt also does a *lot* more than GUI widgets, 
as well. It even has it's own portable file/DB/XML/GL/etc. libraries. I did 
have a link to the qt-interest list about how PerlQt hasn't been maintained 
for almost 2 years, but then I found out that the situation recently changed: 
http://perlqt.infonium.com/


> - wxWindows / wxPerl: this is a cross-platform GUI library (built on
>   top of GTK, or Windows, or other stuff) with a Perl wrapper.  Sounds
>   nice, but I don't know much about it.

I'd really like to try wx, but wxPython didn't actually work in SuSE 7.3 when 
I tried it. I don't know about wxPerl, but it does appear to be maintained: 
http://wxperl.sourceforge.net/

Bottom line: Tk will work everywhere, but is often more of a pain to develop 
in than other toolkits. Forget GTK, those guys don't seem to care much for 
Perl. Qt is really nice, but you *might* end up needing VC++ to make Windows 
binaries. Wx is worth a look, but it might not be available on as many 
platforms as the others. I'm attempting a wxPython compile on SuSE 8.0 right 
now to see if it works properly nowadays.

- -- 
James Oakley
jfunk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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