What are good interactive GUI builder packages for Perl?

Question

I'd like to write some interactive GUIs in Perl. I've used TclTk but it looks dated. I've written QT code for C++, but the PerlTk module hasn't had a release in several years. Googling around I see other possible options.

What are good packages for this, including basic windowing, menus, drawing canvas, scrollbars, and so on.

Answer 1

Try wxPerl!

From the web site:

wxPerl is an extension module allowing the creation of GUI (Graphical User Interface) from Perl; it is built as a wrapper for the awesome wxWidgets C++ GUI toolkit.

Answer 2

Gtk2 has glade2 which can write out an XML file usable by Gtk2::GladeXML. Here is an example of how to bundle the XML with the app in the same file.

I misread the question at first. I thought you wanted a GUI editor for making GUIs (which is what glade2 is). You can also create GUIs using Gtk2 without glade2:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Gtk2;

Gtk2->init;

my $window = Gtk2::Window->new;
my $vbox   = Gtk2::VBox->new;
my $label  = Gtk2::Label->new("Hello World");
my $button = Gtk2::Button->new("Press me");

$window->add($vbox);
$vbox->add($label);
$vbox->add($button);

$window->set_default_size(200, 200);
$window->signal_connect(
    destroy => sub {
     Gtk2->main_quit;
    }
);

my $i = 0;
$button->signal_connect(
    clicked => sub {
     $label->set_text("button pressed " . ++$i . " times");
    }
);

$window->show_all;

Gtk2->main;

Answer 3

Echoing Chas Owens, glade is quite usable with Gtk2 in Perl. In addition, Gtk2 also supports GtkBuilder files (which you can create the the latest glade too).

The main problem with wxPerl (and wxWidgets itself) is that it doesn't let you install file event watchers into its main loop (it only has GUI, Socket and Timer events), unlike Tk and Gtk.

The Qt, Tk and Gtk2 event loops can be used in Perl with AnyEvent, and Gtk2 can be hooked into applications running the Event or Ev mainloop with Glib::Event and Glib::EV modules.

Answer 4

A GUI builder for WxPerl would be wxGlade or wxFormBuilder, both open-source.

Answer 5

I would probably use Gtk2, but Tk is definitely not dead. The lack of releases is due to the bugs being ironed out over the years. A lot of people still use it, and it generally works fine. (Tk's event loop is somewhat silly, but that is a detail that probably shouldn't concern you.) The only disadvantage is that your GUI looks like it is from 1996, but who cares?

(The gitk tool included with git showed that Tk GUIs look fine as long as they're useful.)

Answer 6

I don't have a real answer for you, but often you have to consider your deployment targets. Some of the GUI libraries are very nice, but only if you can get them to work on your operating system. I don't necessarily think that all frameworks need to be cross-platform compatible, a very laudable goal to work toward in a perfect world, as long as the one you choose doesn't lock out a significant portion of your users because the foundation GUIs libraries are hard to install or support on a particular platform.

Answer 7

The solution I'm going with is Gtk-Perl. At first I had difficulty installing it, but in the end I found Camelbox Perl+Gtk2 in one package.

Answer 8

I just want to let everyone know PerlQt is great and this site has a lot of tutorials on how to use it and lots of examples to download.

PerlQt Wiki tutorial

PerlQt is a very fast and easy way to create great looking GUI programs using the Qt drag and drop form designer and Perl. PerlQt is powerful enough for advanced developers and easy for beginners as well.