rfb has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
So we've been discussing around the office the feasabilty of using perl for writing a full windows application, a couple questions that came up are, how about distributing the application, and the licensing involved with activeperl?. and building the gui, are we limited to Tk and Wx which I've recently read about on perl.com? is there or will there be in the future a graphic form builder, ie mscpp?
-rfb
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(Ovid) Re: Full perl based application
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Oct 04, 2001 at 23:09 UTC
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(ichimunki) Re: Full perl based application
by ichimunki (Priest) on Oct 04, 2001 at 23:21 UTC
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Many of these questions are a tad vague.
There are several GUI toolkits for Perl, including one specifically targetted at Win 32: Win32::GUI, Tk, Qt, Wx, and it wouldn't surprise me if gtk were available on Windows as well.
Suggested google.com search "win32 GUI applications perl".
For licensing questions, you'd have to refer to ActiveState and the toolkit developers. Perl Monks are not qualified to give legal advice. :) But do look at Active State's Community License, it looks fairly friendly to me.
Distribution can be as easy as making clients download and install Perl (a good thing-- then they'll be able to use my scripts, too *grin*) and showing them how to set up a shortcut that launches your script. Unless something has changed, I haven't heard too many good things about trying to compile complex Perl apps into Windows stand-alone applications. | [reply] |
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What, are you kidding? PerlApp works great!
The cost: large .exe files. But disk space is cheap, so...
The benefit: No installation problems whatsoever. Unzip your files, run the program. You're done.
Without this, you definitely need to provide an installation program if your target audience even slightly resembles "normal" users.
/J
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I stand corrected then, but this is the first I'm hearing where compiling (assuming this isn't mostly some pseudocompile process that results in an .exe) a Perl application on any platform (other than using perl itself) is a reliable process. What's the catch? And how big is a "large" .exe? 500K, 2mb, or 25mb? I see that it requires a Win2k machine to run, and that it requires a license-- and non-educational licenses look to be somewhat pricy (I am not exactly impoverished, but that DevKit costs more than my VCR did). But still, I can now say I've heard differently.
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yea, I guess my questions are pretty vague, still havent decided where were going with this tho. no clear plan.. I guess I just want to know what the issues would be, mabey some others' experiences. -rfb
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