IWL: A Perl widget library for the web

<p>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:

use IWL;
# create the main container, and a few widgets
my $page = IWL::Page->new;
my $frame = IWL::Frame->new;
my $iconbox = IWL::Iconbox->new
(width => '800px', height => '600px');
my $button = IWL::Button->newFromStock
('IWL_STOCK_CANCEL');
my %some_icon_info = ("foo.jpg" => 'foo', "bar.png" => 'bar');
# Setting up the icons and adding them to the iconbox
foreach (keys %some_icon_info) {
my $icon = IWL::Iconbox::Icon->new;
$icon->setImage($_);
$icon->setText($some_icon_info{$_});
$icon->setDimensions('64px', '64px');
$icon->setSelected(1) if $_ == 'something';
$iconbox->appendIcon($icon);
}
$page->appendMetaEquiv("Cache-control" => "no-cache");
$frame->setLabel("Frame label");
# Adding the children to their parents
$frame->appendChild($iconbox);
$frame->appendChild($button);
$page->appendChild($frame);
# Finally printing the page
$page->print;

2 Comments »

Comments feed TrackBack URI

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)

Comment by Adam Nemeth — October 16, 2007

How about performance in larger websites? Will it scale?

Comment by Teemu Arina — October 16, 2007

Ajax Questions and Answers

Usability Systems
While I've kind of put a hold on the monitoring solution (kind of shifted gears, so twiddling between that and another project), one thing is true...

Goodbye to three-tier computing?
Software in the original mainframe days was all glommed together. Why not? Who was looking? Sometimes, reluctantly, some structure came about. Even in...

Node.js: Bubbling up from JavaScript
Jack Vaughan, Site Editor Bubbling under the mainstream of computing these days is the fast growing phenomenon of Node.js – a framework built on...