First time post to this list (I think). I have been a big user at my company where I have developed several in house applications with wxPerl. I originally began using perlQt, but due to the serious bugs with the table widget, and the fact that Ashley Winters seems to have dropped off the face of the planet, I switched to WxPerl. But… due to internal foot-dragging in our IT dept, I am stuck with WxWidgets 2.8.10. It makes me sad to hear you say that WxPerl is dying, but for me and my department, it will likely have many more years left.
----------------------- Jim Clark <>< j...@jimclark.net 408-781-1425 prepare yourselves... On Jan 3, 2013, at 2:59 AM, Johan Vromans wrote: > Steve Cookson <steveco.1...@gmail.com> writes: > >> ... an appeal on the community to keep wxPerl alive ... > > Every once in a while an appeal like this is made. Mark did it some time > ago, I personally felt the need to write one 'one of these days' but > Steve was faster this time. > > I was delighted to see 16 responses in a short term, however, most > responses were about the wiki problems. Although this is a real pain > (and we have a decent working wiki by now -- thanks to Huub) it > distracts from the main issue: wxPerl is dying. > > wxPerl = GUI desktop programs > > wxPerl = wxWidgets + Perl > > wxWidgets is dying. > > Perl is dying. > > Now, don't start yelling that much effort is being put right now in > wxWidgets and Perl. I know that. But we must ask ourselves: to what > purpose? > > Perl seems to be moving to a framework for Web applications. When you > carefully watch the current activities in the Perl community, it is all > Catalyst, Mojolicious, Dancer. The only other significant activity is > MetaCPAN, yet another attempt to bring order in CPAN where the C seems > to stand for Chaotic. (I exclude perl6 activities since I consider perl6 > too immature to be useful for anything.) There's little to no interest > in creating decent Perl programs. Have you ever wondered why there is > only support for modules on CPAN, and no support for programs? > > wxWidgets seems to be moving, as Steve correctly metions, towards a > desktop development system. > > So we see different directions for wxWidgets and Perl. > > We can ask ourselves: what do we want? > > For me, wxPerl is the means to develop mature, usefull, user friendly, > cross-platform desktop applications in my favourite programming > language. > > 25 years ago, when Perl was born, only a selective group of people, > commonly called 'nerds', could use computers. Nowadays everybody uses > computers. And due to the influence of Windows and Mac, almost everybody > is used to serious, mature, usefull, user friendly desktop applications > like Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Firefox, Photoshop and so on. > > With wxPerl we can write applications like these. Moreover, due to the > cross-platform features, these applications can be deployed on the most > popular desktop platforms: Windows, MacOSX and Linux. > > It is at this point that I want to give tons of kudo's to Mark Dootson > for creating and maintaining CitrusPerl and CavaPackager. > > But why do I say "wxPerl is dying"? > > Writing mature, usefull, user friendly, cross-platform desktop > applications if a complicated task. Photoshop wasn't developed > overnight, in fact, most of the examples I mentioned took 10 years or > more to become what they are today. So it is not surprising that there > are few wxPerl applications in this collection. See e.g. > http://wiki.wxperl.nl/w/index.php/List_of_wxPerl_desktop_applications > > But times are changing. We now have iDevices and Android phones and > tablets, and millions and millions of users of apps, small applications > that are usually up to a single task, and try to do that in a clever and > intuitive way. These are the applications of the future. Since they're > small and clever, wxPerl would be an excellent tool to develop > applications like these -- Perl has always had a good reputation for > small and nifty programs. For every team of Perl developers working on > desktop applications there are thousands of Perl developers wanting to > develop apps. > > Except they can't. > > There's no Perl on iOS. There's no Perl on Android. Not visibly. There's > no wxWidgets on iOS nor Android. And although these platforms have been > around for several years, there are no concrete plans to provide > wxWidgets on these platforms. (Note that I use the word "provide", not > "port".) Considering the traditional cross-platform nature of wxWidgets, > it could be the first development tool to produce apps for both iOS and > Android. It would be a real killer. > > But, as it stands now, despite of all the effort put in the current > wxWidgets development, I think wxWidgets is a dead end. And so is > wxPerl. > > Oh yes, there will be people developing using wxWidgets and Perl, but > there'll be only few. The threshold is way too high. > > What can *you* do? > > Just prove that I'm wrong. > > We can at least lower the threshold by making it attractive to develop > small desktop programs that do something sensible and look nice. I still > consider wxGlade --yet another dead end-- a good tool to start wxPerl > development. The wiki is functional again. Let's create examples. > Tutorials. > > Happy hacking! > > -- Johan > http://johan.vromans.org/seasons_greetings.html
