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Postings from June 2006
> >> Now we have wxPerl at what looks like a >> mature stage, and can we learn from history and ensure it survives long >> enough to build up a solid core of users? > <rant> FWIW: I do appreciate the efforts expended to provide wxPerl. My rant is offered not as disparagement, but out of frustration. Hopefully, it will be received as a friendly "wake up" call to its advocates, because I and others really would like to use wxPerl. But personally, I don't consider wxPerl "mature". Very capable ? Yes. Very nice native look/feel ? Of course. Do I want to use it ? Very much. I've tried to use it, and after 2 days of hair-tearing and cussing like a Russian sailor, I *finally* managed to get a very simple demo with a cascading menu working. At which point I purged my system of all traces of wxPerl. Contrary to the frequent assertions that "its just like the C++ API", it isn't. And even if it were, I code in *Perl*, not C++. So, in order to figure out how to implement a cascading menu, I eventually had to pour over the wxPerl source - which (at least at the time) pretty much lacked any useable comments. Which seems to be standard practice, since most of the demos didn't have any comments either. Meanwhile, Perl/Tk took me all of 15 minutes to figure out how to implement the same feature. For that matter, I've managed to randomly pull Javascript widgets from the web and figure out how to implement cascading popup menus in a browser in 30 minutes or so. Documentation matters. If the wxPerl community expects others to jump on their bandwagon (and, really, I *want* to jump on), they need to invest some time in POD generation (e.g., go to CPAN and count the number of widgets that have any hyperlink...and then read the docs for those that do. Trust me, it won't take long. Then hop over to http://www.wxpython.org/ to see whats possible.). If, as claimed, the API is nearly identical to the wxWidgets base, I'd think the task would be a simple matter of writing a little Perl script to touch up the wxWidget docs into POD; hell, leave them as HTML, but show me how wxPerl is used in *Perl*. Then supply some *useful* tutorials (no, showing how to rubberstamp images onto a canvas isn't useful. Instead, think "Eclipse"; or take the vast collection of demos in the pTk bundle and convert them to wxPerl). After the mentions here, I bounced over to sf.net to see the "documentation" promised on the CPAN page. Yeah, that was worth the trip... App::GUI:Notepad is swell...but its hardly representative of a large scale desktop GUI app. Until there are usable docs that don't require pawing thru the wxPerl source, and then require me to translate C++ into Perl, its likelihood of adoption by *developers* is pretty limited. And based on dialogues I've had with others looking for a pTk alternative, my opinion is not an isolated one. </rant>