Question

I have a Perl command-line script that I want to convert to a rich. cross-platform desktop GUI application. What’s the best method to do it. I want to the internal and the logic code in Perl but the GUI should be rich web application.

Answer 1

I have been working on the Perl module XUL::Gui on CPAN which uses Firefox as a host platform to render cross platform gui’s from Perl. All you need is Firefox installed on the target platforms. It is currently in development, but may be stable enough for your needs. Here is a brief example of how the syntax looks:

use XUL::Gui;

display Window title => 'Foo Processor',
    Hbox(
        (map {
            my $id = $_;
            CheckBox id => $id,
                label   => "use $id",
                option  => sub {shift->checked eq 'true' ? " -$id" : ()}
          } qw/foo bar baz/
        ),
        TextBox( id => 'num', 
             type   => 'number', 
             option => sub {' -num ' . shift->value}
        ),
        Button( label => 'run', oncommand => sub {
            my @opts = map {$ID{$_}->option} qw/foo bar baz num/;
            $ID{txt}->value = `fooproc @opts`;
        }),
    ),
    TextBox( FILL, id => 'txt' );

Since it is under development, if you have any feature requests (or find any bugs) let me know.

Also, since you are inside of Firefox, any web technologies that Firefox supports (canvas, iframes, flash…) are fully usable from Perl. For gui components, you can use any combination of HTML and XUL tags.