Any ideas?

Grab timemachine, travel back one year, prepare for this upcoming class :p

learn the wxWidgets and the wxGlade and the wxPerl

http://gtk2-perl.sourceforge.net/doc/gtk2-perl-tut/, Gtk2::GladeXML - Create user interfaces directly from Glade XML files.

Prima, VB - Visual Builder for the Prima toolkit

...

I'd still recommend Tk. It may seem outdated, but it works, it gets the job done, and there's plenty of documentation and tutorials around. And if you are going to teach a course, and the course's aim is to teach a way to code GUIs, then I think that your toolkit of choice should be well documented, and easy to use first, because it's just a tool to teach your students working with widget toolkits.

There's a good chance, that if your students learn to use Tk, they won't have many problems switching to wx, or GTK, as long as you teach them the basics - separating the presentation and the content, laying out the widgets, using some geometry managers, and so on.

That said, some links that can be useful:

• Perl/Tk chapter from Advanced Perl Programming, User Interfaces with Tk
• User Guide from the module's documentation
• SpecTcl - a GUI builder for Tk, released as open source by ActiveState
• other Perl/Tk stuff

I hope that any of this will be useful to you. All the best, and good luck with the course!

regards,
Luke Jefferson

If you are under orders to teach with a GUI designer, Glade is still probably your best bet.

If you notice, very few people actually use those GUI designer programs for anything more than simple popups and displays, because it just gets too hard to follow the boilerplate code.

Tk is not outdated . Here you can find excellent TK tutorial for Perl

Not to be contrary, but yes, perl/Tk (what perl programmers refer to as Tk) is outdated, and has been for at least 10 years, in relation to the toolkit it is built on, Tcl/Tk

The tutorial you link to is for Tkx , a thin interface to Tcl, and its gui library toolkit, Tk

Unlike Tk.pm, Tkx does not have a book or two dedicated to it, and relies mostly on Tcl/Tk documentation, which means you have to learn Tcl

The tutorial you linked helps with the easy tcl syntax, like the Tkx docs, but as soon as you reach for the reference Tcl/Tk docs, you have to learn more Tcl syntax, so you can translate to perl.

Tcl::pTk, like Tkx, builds on Tcl but does it with Tk.pm compatible syntax, and takes the brilliant step and exposes the Tcl interpreter, so you can Eval Tcl code directly, no need to translate to perl at all

What Tk.pm has going for it, is years and years and years of use, many perl users, and many perl examples and cpan extensions

What Tkx/Tcl::pTk have going for it, is years and years and years of use, many Tcl users, many tcl examples, and TEA/TEApot/TEAcup extensions

With ActiveState/ppm/Tkx you get, a certain set of Tcl/Tk widgets, Tcl::tkkit, great for embedding via par/perlapp/perl2exe. Its mostly a one-two-click operation, but you can't add more widgets.

If you go your own way :) you can install ActiveTcl (or other tcl distribution) and then install Tcl/Tcl::pTk||Tkx, you also get the ability, to install other widgets, like TIX, at the cost of two installations to manage, two path entries ... unless you decide which widgets you want and then build your own Tcl::kit equivalent

So yes, that tutorial you linked, is most excellent ^{2) one good tut}.

If you stick to ActivePerl, Tkx is well supported by perl at minimal expense to the programmer, with an excellent but fixed set of widgets, with decent enough documentation.

SpecTCL fills the WYSYWIG designer role nicely, but the binaries are a tad dated, built around Tk 8.4 (ActivePerl deploys with the stable 8.5 , the current beta is 8.6)

Suitable for beginners? Yup, its a very good toehold, ought to get a beginner making short GUI programs in short order

Hi :)

As AM points out above, in a very nice article I might add, you've linked to a tutorial whose Perl code is for Tkx. Here's a Tk version:

use Tk;
use Scalar::Util qw{looks_like_number};

my ($feet, $metres) = (q{}, q{});

my $mw = MainWindow->new(-title => q{Feet to Metres});
my $f = $mw->Frame()
    ->grid(-padx => 12, -pady => 3, -sticky => q{nsew});
my %pad = (-padx => 5, -pady => 5);
my $feet_E = $f->Entry(-textvariable => \$feet, -width => 7)
    ->grid(-row => 0, -column => 1, -sticky => q{we}, %pad);
$f->Label(-text => q{feet})
    ->grid(-row => 0, -column => 2, -sticky => q{w}, %pad);
$f->Label(-text => q{is equivalent to})
    ->grid(-row => 1, -column => 0, -sticky => q{e}, %pad);
$f->Label(-textvariable => \$metres)
    ->grid(-row => 1, -column => 1, -sticky => q{we}, %pad);
$f->Label(-text => q{metres})
    ->grid(-row => 1, -column => 2, -sticky => q{w}, %pad);
my $calc_B = $f->Button(-text => q{Calculate}, -command => sub {
    $metres = looks_like_number($feet)
        ? int(0.3048 * $feet * 10000.0 + 0.5) / 10000.0 : q{};
})->grid(-row => 2, -column => 2, -sticky => q{w}, %pad);

$feet_E->focus();
$mw->bind(q{<Return>} => sub {$calc_B->invoke()});

MainLoop;
[download]

-- Ken