Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
IWL: A Perl widget library for the web
Category: JavaScript
, Library, Perl
Viktor Kojouharov was sick of constantly having html code snippets inside his perl code. He was seeing too many projects where the code was a messy mixture of perl, html, and in some places, javascript. Since he is familiar with the Gtk+ toolkit he decided to make something similar targeted for the Web.
He ended up with IWL which is, in Viktors words:
basically a graphical toolkit, or widget library, much like Gtk+ or the ETK library for enlightenment. The main goal of this library is to create a full blown RIA, without the need to write html in your code. When I started working on it roughly a year and a half ago, there was nothing similar existed for Perl. By using the library where I work, it has so far mostly achieved its main objective (and has also proven to be an excellent subject for my diploma thesis :))
If you are a Perl developer who prefers writing apps in a toolkit style like below, then IWL may be fore you:
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use IWL;
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# create the main container, and a few widgets
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my $page = IWL::Page->new;
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my $frame = IWL::Frame->new;
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my $iconbox = IWL::Iconbox->new
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(width => '800px', height => '600px');
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my $button = IWL::Button->newFromStock
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('IWL_STOCK_CANCEL');
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my %some_icon_info = ("foo.jpg" => 'foo', "bar.png" => 'bar');
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# Setting up the icons and adding them to the iconbox
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my $icon = IWL::Iconbox::Icon->new;
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$icon->setImage($_);
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$icon->setText($some_icon_info{$_});
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$icon->setDimensions('64px', '64px');
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$icon->setSelected(1) if $_ == 'something';
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$iconbox->appendIcon($icon);
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}
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$page->appendMetaEquiv("Cache-control" => "no-cache");
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$frame->setLabel("Frame label");
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# Adding the children to their parents
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$frame->appendChild($iconbox);
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$frame->appendChild($button);
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$page->appendChild($frame);
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# Finally printing the page
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$page->print;
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Great! Now a GUI designer could be written for such - it’s much more easier to do with a toolkit-style system than a plain HTML-templating based one.
If you look at the NetCraft stats published yesterday, you can see that IIS has a serious gain, and it would be hard to say .NET and its design tools aren’t to be taken into account:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/10/overalld.gif
So, toolkit-based approach and better IDEs would probably help out some developer communities.
(Personally I never liked .NET and I still prefer to write javascript rather than generate it - but trends are clear, some will need to move)
How about performance in larger websites? Will it scale?