However I think you may also be looking in a direction that isn't entirely necessary and is probably reinventing the wheel. With a particularly useful and cross platform interface such as HTML why aren't IE, Netscape, Lynx and the myriad of other web browsers fine? HTML is an especially easy way to create a simple quick and easy interface and there is enough extendability that you can quite easily bury yourself in complex designs and interfaces.

Most of the work that I do, co-workers and friends in Perl that requires more than a rudemntary interface that can be done on the command line I usually just have the browser and CGI.pm handle it.

In my mind I guess the effort that would need to be put into replacing Perl/TK probably isn't worth it, and although the Java API might sound like a good foot print or reference for a design it can't really mesh with Perl well. The biggest problem probably being that Java is multi-threaded and Perl is sort of with the implication that it isn't even supported. So a lot of the cool tricks that you can do with Java to make a GUI just wouldn't translate well into Perl without a significant rewrite.

Maybe we'll see a whole new Perl out of 6 though and it may close a lot of the technical gaps that make many of these things difficult at best.

And I also don't mean to burst your bubble or anything, I think that something *very* cool could be done right now in that space. There certainly are no short comings of web browsers, *NIX platforms or anything else. It is always good to have choices and it is especially fun to do something else somebody has done so you can do it better!