(GUI) Windows Programming FAQ

Installing it is a breeze, learning it is easy, and the widget set is very nice and mature in terms of reliability and use. The canvas widget deals with graphics easily, though if you're looking to make a first-person-shooter it won't be sufficient. I typically just create the graphics with GD or something, then attach them to a canvas, though there are native functions for drawing directly on the canvas.

While you do have to have the Tk module installed on any machine that will be running your scripts, you can also purchase PerlApp from ActiveState, which will allow you to turn your Perl scripts into binaries on Solaris, Linux, and Windows. I've used it before to build rather robust Perl/Tk applications, replete with complex compound widgets etc., and it works like a charm. The Windows users typically never realize they are running something written in Perl and the code gets written in half the time.

Hope this helps :-)

There's also wxPerl which is a wrapper for wxWindows. I'm not sure how easy it is to do graphics, that depends on what you mean. But it's certainly portable. You should have no trouble running your script on Linux, Win, and MacOS.

my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];

The only portability problems I've had with Tk are things like pointer icon colors.
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Snazzy tagline here

As far as "packaging" scripts to run without modules pre-installed....

If you can assume that Perl is present, you can write a mini-program to look for modules, e.g.

  unless ( eval " use Tk; " ) {
    &do_install ('Tk');
  }
  exec "my-real-program.plx";

# ...

sub do_install ($) {
  my $pkg = shift;
  print "Installing $pkg module...";
  if ($^O =~ /win/i) {
    `ppm install $pkg.PPD`;
  } else {
    chdir ('unix_pkg');
    `tar -zxf $pkg.tar.gz`;
    chdir ($pkg);
    require "Makefile.PL";
    `sudo gmake install`;
  }
}
[download]

The above code is both untested (ergo probably nonfunctional and nonportable) and ugly, but it's near enough to what I've used in a pinch before.

See Win32::GUI vs Tk and Perl GUI? for previous discussions of this.

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^+*`^ ve^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'

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Best Regards,
perl -e "print a|r,p|d=>b|p=>chr 3**2 .7=>t and t"

I agree. My team and I have done a lot of work in Perl/Tk. It is very flexible and supremely portable. Problems are minor and easily solved.

Regards, Helgi Briem

package Lizard::King;
sub can { do { 'anything'} };
[download]

Tk comes with ActiveState Perl for Windows, so lots of people already have the Tk module installed.

My personal experience is that Tk's widgets make life much easier by already providing much of the functionality you could want. The Canvas is especially good, you can draw graphics and text, have objects in the Canvas respond to events (mouse-clicks, etc.) and it will output to PostScript.

Kevin O'Rourke

Yes, especially the canvas is great. I played around a little bit and had written an easy game within some hours. If you want, you can download it from http://www.fabiani.net/ -> Tips&Tricks -> Eigene Scripte -> Download von Käsekästchen

It's not yet finished (maybe will never finish), but writing it was big fun.

Have fun,
perl -e "print a|r,p|d=>b|p=>chr 3**2 .7=>t and t"