Pashua
p. My current mania for all things Perlish has lead me to [“Pashua”:http://q41.de/downloads/pashua_en/]—a framework for wrapping a simple GUI around Perl, PHP or shell scripts as a dialogue to input values into the scripts. There doesn’t seem to be a way to capture output to a text box or dialogue window as yet, but the strength of Pashua is its simplicity. With the aid of the example provided in the package, I managed to knock up a neat little front end to a Perl script I was working on last week to convert an email header style date format to a Movabletype style format, which was prompted by an email exchange with [“dvd”:http://fuddland.org.uk/blog/]. He has long since solved the problem very neatly, but I’ve carried on tinkering regardless because it forms a nice real-world problem from which to learn lots of painful lessons about coding efficient and elegant solutions in Perl.
p. If you want to build more complex GUIs with a Perl foundation, “CamelBones”:http://camelbones.sourceforge.net/ seems to be the way to go, but is correspondingly more difficult to get to grips with, especially if—like me—you aren’t familiar with the process of building Cocoa applications. Basically, I don’t know my nibs from elbow. Of course, some might argue that Perl is best used efficiently on the command line, or toiling away quietly behind a web interface (as in the system driving this very weblog), but I like pushing things to their limit. I suppose I also like to get my money’s worth for the effort that I put in to learning something…
