My current mania for all things Perlish has lead me to Pashua–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. 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.

If you want to build more complex GUIs with a Perl foundation, CamelBones 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…