Ok, I was going to wait for Aldo to subscribe to this mailing
list, but he seems to be a little slow on the weekends, so
we'll have to start without him.
Currently we have 8 list members subscribed, including myself.
A little about me- I am a not a perl expert by any means...I know
enough to be dangerous, but am still learning. Most of what I have
done in the past is just CGI related, but when I came across Win32::GUI
I knew this was something that deserved further attention and development.
I REALLY like the concept of making GUI Windows apps using a language I
already feel comfortable with, instead of having to learn some other company's
proprietary language.
This could be really big. I doubt we'll see Visual Perl++ come out anytime soon,
but right now this is the next best thing :)
Here's my formula for creating a windows app I can share with friends who don't
have perl.
1. Design the GUI in Visual Basic and use frm2pl.pl to convert it to Perl::Win32
syntax. This is unfortunately an expensive route for people spoiled by getting
the latest perl distribution for free... Does anyone have another method of
designing their GUI that is easy and cheap, for people that don't happen to have
an old copy of Visual Basic lying around?
2. Once the script works, how do you lose that pesky console window? I haven't
found any way to do it, except in compiling (if you go that route)
3. Use perl2exe (from http://www.demobuilder.com/perl2exe.htm) to compile the
script into a working executable. If you compile with the -gui option it will
not run a console window. I suspect there ought to
be a way to do this without compiling. Anyway, at this point the app can be
distributed. But- the next catch is, perl2exe is also an expensive program (I
think $149 is pretty expensive for a single command-line app). The lite version
still costs $49 and doesn't allow -gui compilation. sigh....
Also, when I ran the trial-version compiled program on another computer it
bombed the perl.dll when it tried to display the little nagware message at
close. So I guess that makes it crashware?
It would be very nice if someone out there who knows a little C++ would make a
program similar to perl2exe and distribute it in the public domain. Not wanting
to make the author of perl2exe go broke, but c'mon, $149 for a command line app
with a single function? If perl2exe is worth $149 that means perl must be worth
thousands...
Ok, enough ranting, has anyone made anything really cool yet using Win32::GUI?
-Joe
