I tried wxGlade briefly, but to me it was more annoying than just coding what I wanted by hand -- especially since in Perl it's easy to throw together a bunch of small classes that wrap the base Wx libraries and give you a nice interface that does what you want.

For working examples, consider checking out Wx::Demo. It gives you running examples of every class in wxPerl, and the source code is just a click away.

For documentation, all you really need to look at is the C++ Wx reference. Once you learn the few conventions for converting the C++ to Perl you're all set, and when there are any Perl-specific quirks they're noted right in the same reference.

Once you learn the few conventions for converting the C++ to Perl you're all set ...

And therein lies my problem. Being fairly familiar with Perl Tk, I find the Wx Perl examples awkward (especially the new package declaration for each widget - arrrgh). I want to like Wx, I even bought the book, but whenever I try to learn it my brain fogs up, my eyes glaze over, and I go back to Tk.

The Wx Perl documentation says, as you do, to use C++ documentation and convert to Perl. However, there are no further details and my feeble brain has not been able to get a handle on this conversion. Would you (or anyone) be so kind as to elaborate on the conversion conventions you mentioned?

This module comes with extensive documentation in HTML format; you can download it from http://wxperl.sourceforge.net/
http://wxperl.sourceforge.net/tutorial/tutorial1.html

The key thing you need to keep in mind while browsing wxWidgets documentation is that, if a wxPerl class is called, say, Wx::Frame, you should search for wxFrame in wxWidgets documentation.

I easily installed Wx::Demo on Windows XP. Surprisingly, the documentation does not say how to actually run or invoke the demo. I would have expected at least a code snippet shown. Even better, I would have liked something like PerlWxDemo.exe to have been created. Exactly how does one "run" Wx::Demo?

run 'wxperl_demo.pl'; under Mac OS X you will need to run 'wxPerl -S wxperl_demo.pl'.

$ wxperl_demo --help
Version: 0.11

Usage: C:\perl\5.10.1\bin/wxperl_demo.bat
           --help        this help
           --show ???    showing the particular Demo
           --list        list all available modules
[download]

FWIW I've often thought that it would be very useful to create a utility that provides an interactive text-based dialog with the developer to build prototypes for this. wxGlade was extremely frustrating (which is probably why people use the commercial version).

There once was an AI system (I forget the name - something treasury I think) that used ascii art drawings to map rooms and tell the system where the bed is, etc. in order to describe the plot of a story. I've thought ascii art (or more modern) representations might be interesting ways to quickly block out GUI layouts, and (though it shouldn't be) be a lot faster than frustrating wxGlade. FWIW.