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From: [email protected] (Peter Prymmer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.tk,comp.lang.perl.announce,comp.answers,news.answers
Subject: comp.lang.perl.tk FAQ part1 of 5
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Perl/Tk FAQ part 1 of 5 - Getting Started
*****************************************

______________________________________________________________________

6. How do I build it?

In general, building perl/Tk requires:

1. A made & installed perl (requires a C language compiler). You may
need different versions of perl depending on which version of Tk you
wish to run.
2. A C language compiler for the Tk code itself.
3. A linkable Xlib (.o, .so, .a, etc.) for X-windows.

Perl/Tk has been successfully built using various vendors' cc compilers, as
well as with the free GNU gcc compiler. A make utility of some sort (make/
gmake) will be extremely helpful.

Step - by - step the commands to build the Tk extension to Perl are (for the
dynamically linked version) roughly as follows:

1. make install # the appropriate version of perl.
2. uninstall # prior versions of the Tk extension to perl.
3. gunzip -c Tk400.202.tar.gz | tar xvf - (options to tar
may vary esp. on SysV)
4. cd Tk400.200
5. read INSTALL
6. perl Makefile.PL
7. make
8. make test
9. make install

For the statically linked version you would `make tkperl` just after
executing the `make` step and before the `make test` step.

Note carefully that this process leaves behind a large amount of
documentation and examples in various sub-directories. You are strongly
encouraged to look carefully through your build tree for docs, examples, etc.
and keep those valuable files in a safe place. You might consider tar-ing them
off and installing in a webserver directory tree.

A relatively easy way to determine if the perl on your system allows for
dynamic linking was mentioned by Kenneth Albanowski
<[email protected]>. If the following does not say "dl_none.xs" then you
probably do have dynamically linked perl (or perhaps a very non-Unixy perl):

perl -e 'use Config; print $Config{dlsrc},"\n"'

(thanks to Paul Lussier <[email protected]> for the correction!).

Here is a little more detailed discussion of each the steps just given:

o Install Perl Read the Tk files (Tk*/README, etc.) for info on which
version of perl is required for the perl/Tk kit you obtained.) For code
locations see a CPAN site (separate question in this FAQ), the actual
installation instructions come bundled in the perl***.tar.gz
distribution file. (Perl Configure & make troubles are beyond the
scope of this FAQ - please see the Perl FAQ itself or the INSTALL file
for more help with this critical step.)
You can install perl almost anywhere you like by specifying the
-Dprefix=/path argument to sh Configure
o Unpack perl/Tk outside the Perl distribution
(i.e. outside the perl build, perl install, or perl lib areas).
gunzip Tk400.202.tar.gz
tar -xvf Tk400.202.tar
(Your tar program may not take -xvf. The resultant Tk400.202/
area will be referred to as your ``Tk build'' directory throughout this
document.)
o Read INSTALL carefully
cd Tk400.202
pager INSTALL
where pager is the program you use to scroll through text files more
or less. Be sure to read it and don't just pound away on the spacebar.
o If necessary remove any previously installed version of perl/Tk
If you had a previously working version of Tk installed, you may need
to resurrect the Makefile for it and execute:
make uninstall
make realclean
before you unpack the new version. (The uninstall target of
MakeMaker is relatively new so please be careful here.)
o Have perl generate a custom Makefile.
perl Makefile.PL
(see below for more on this step.)
o Compile.
make
(if and only if building static: make tkperl
o Test.
make test
o Install.
make install
o Play with it.
basic_demo
(modify #! line if necessary, or specify /path/to/perl
./basic_demo)
(warning if you build Tk-b9.01 with perl5.002gamma then change the
line in basic_demo from
use lib ./blib;
to
use lib qw(blib/arch blib/lib);)
o Save the documentation and examples in a safe accessible place.
use tar, cp, mv, chmod or whatever you prefer to save the valuable
ancillary files from your Tk build tree.

On the perl Makefile.PL step it may be necessary to give explicit
locations of the required X11 libraries and/or include headers. For example:

perl Makefile.PL X11=/usr/local/X11R5

or perhaps different directory tree specification is necessary with your X
installation:

perl Makefile.PL X11INC=/usr/local/share/X11R5/include \
X11LIB=/usr/local/arch/X11R5/lib

There are system and site dependencies in all of the above steps. However, the
largest single source of build trouble comes from not using the latest versions
of the various utilities (C compiler, make, etc.). In particular ensure that
when you say perl Makefile.PL that the perl that gets invoked is up to
date - use which perl (or whence perl) and perl -v to determine this.
If necessary specify the full path name to your perl5 interpreter/compiler.
(Some people do not rm their older perl interpreters when upgrading to a more
recent version - beware.)

If you still run into trouble take a look at the INSTALL, the README and the
README file for your specific system (e.g. README.AIX, README.OSF, etc.).
You might also find your system mentioned in the ptk hyper-mail archive at:

http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/ptk/
or
http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/
or
ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/archives/

or the Perl 5 Porters page at one of the following URLs:

http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/Perl5-Porters/
http://www.hut.fi/~jhi/perl5-porters.html

If you wish to discuss your Tk build problems with others run and save the
output from the myConfig script in the Tk build directory (the output may
already be in the myConfig.out file from your perl/Tk build directory), as
well as the myconfig script in your perl build directory (or the output of perl
-V with a capitol V). It is often helpful to include the output of either (or both)
of these scripts in your discussion.

Presented here are the beginnings of a list of problems associated with
building perl/Tk on various platforms (for help building perl itself please refer
to the Perl FAQ). This list is in no way complete nor authoritative (nor is it
necessarily even up-to-date!) but simply lists problems people have reported.
Keep in mind that your installation may differ (e.g. location differences such
as /usr/bin/perl vs. /usr/local/bin/perl) even if its the same
platform listed here:

A Sampling of Perl/Tk Platforms:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

AIX:
As of perl5.002b & Tk-b9.01 README.AIX says no patching is
necessary.

For Tk-b8: modifying the perl.exp file may be necessary. There is a
patch in Tk-b8/README.AIX. It may be necessary to make
regen_headers after the patch.
FreeBSD:
Nate Patwardhan <[email protected]> reports no trouble at all with
Tk400.200 on FreeBSD-2.1.5 or FreeBSD-2.2.1.
HPUX:
For Tk-b11: One person reports a need to add #define
TIMEOFDAY_TZ to the tkConfig.h header file in order to compile on
HPUX 9.05.

Previous versions: Most people seem to prefer the dynamic linking
afforded by a recent version of the gcc compiler on this system.
Linux:
John C. Wingenbach indicates that should you encounter an error
message like Cannot find -lX11 anywhere at ./myConfig
line 184 when running your perl Makefile.PL (under Slakware
3.0) that you should be more specific about -l/path/to/libX11.a.
Adam Wasserman <[email protected]> has graciously
provided a compilation of Linux compilation trials & tribulations. It is
an (as yet un-edited) document available at:
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/hints/linux_compile.txt
MachTen:
Mark Pease <[email protected]> mentions that:
I was able to get Tk-b11.02 running under MachTen 2.2 perl5.002_01.
I did need to make one change to get a round a MachTen problem. In
pTk/tclUnix.h, pwd.h is included, but it is also included in pTk/tkPort.h
(which is included in Lang.h, which is use by tclUnixUtil.c, whew!)

MachTen's pwd.h can't be included more that once or you get an
error.

It looked to me like tclUnix.h was only used in tclUnixUtil.c, so I
commented out the #include <pwd.h> in tclUnix.h.
NetBSD:
Jesus M. Gonzalez <[email protected]> mentions success with:
Tk-b11.01 compiles, installs and runs just out of the box in
NetBSD-1.1/i386. I just followed the INSTALL instructions.
NeXTSTEP:
Gerd Knops recently posted a discussion of the steps to get perl
running on several NeXTSTEPs to p5p.
OS/2:
Ilya Zakharevich <[email protected]> has compiled a
modified form of Tk-b11.02 to work with the Xfree86 client/server
package, as well more advanced versions working with the Open32 PM
package.
OSF/1:
As of perl5.002b & Tk-b9.01 you will probably be able to follow the
usual instructions. John Stoffel <[email protected]> reports that if you
use gcc (rather than cc) you should use at least version 2.7.2

For Tk-b8: make is reputedly not up to the task on this system.
Tk-b8/README.OSF recommends gmake instead.
Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email protected]> reports a successful
build with Perl 5.001m, xsubpp 1.922, MakeMaker 4.23. He points
out that it was necessary for him to upgrade the xsubpp and
MakeMaker that he received with his copy of Perl5.001m.
SCO:
For Tk-b8: Eric J. Bohm <[email protected]> reported a need to
comment out line(s) from myConfig and GNUMakefiles using GNU
make 3.67. (See Tk-b8/README.SCO for specifics.)
SGI (Irix):
For Tk-b11.02: Phillip Moore <[email protected]> reports a clean
build on IRIX 5.3.

Matthew Black <[email protected]> recently mentioned a need to apply
"patchSG0000596" to get perl sockets to work. His message was
copyrighted and is not included here. Send e-mail to him to find out
where the get "patchSG0000596".
Suns:
SunOS (BSD):
For Tk-b10 on SunOS 4.1.3_U1
using SparcWorks acc 3.0.1 Frederick L. Wagner <[email protected]>
reports needing to use the perl malloc rather than the system malloc()
when building perl.
For Tk-b8: Tom Tignor <[email protected]> reports the following on
SunOS (sun4m sparc): Tue, 28 Nov 1995 13:19:42
In trying to make, I got a "write: argument mismatch" error for the file
ptK/Lang.h. I looked at the file and found the offending function,
Tcl_GetOpenFile, which has a third argument called "doWrite" (not
"write") in tkGlue.c. I changed the argument from "write" to "doWrite"
in Lang.h and it's compiling fine (for the moment. :)
Solaris (System V):
For Tk-b8: There is trouble getting perl to use Socket routines (i.e.
trouble with make perl itself not necessarily trouble with Tk-b8). See
the perl FAQ for more info or the .shar file that Tom Christiansen
occasionally posts to comp.lang.perl.misc. Further information on perl
inter process communication can be found in the perlipc* files at:
ftp://ftp.perl.com/perl/info/everything_to_know/.
SVR4:
For Tk-b8: Martha G. Armour and Len Reed report on two separate
hardware platforms running SVR4 - extensive details in
Tk-b8/README.SVR4. Interestingly, they report no trouble at all on
Linux.
Ultrix:
Peter Prymmer reports that with Tk-b11 it was necessary to change
the line in Makefile.PL that reads:
'LIBS' => ["$xlib -lX11 -lpt -lsocket -lnsl -lm"],
to read:
'LIBS' => ["$xlib -lX11 -lpt -lsocket -lnsl -lm
-ldnet"],
because of a newer X11 in /usr/local that needed the DECnet protocol
linking.

John Stoffel reports a successful build of static Tk-b10 on Ultrix 4.5.
Windows NT:
Nick Ing-Simmons reports success with the alpha Tk404.000 kit,
perl5.004, and Visual C++.

non-Unix(ish)es:
++++++++++++++++

Information on non-Unix(ish) perl platforms may be obtained from
newsgroups and email lists as well as a few world wide web sites. For example,
try the Perl 5 Porters (p5p) [page|archives] at one of:

http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/Perl5-Porters/
http://www.hut.fi/~jhi/perl5-porters.html

In general your non-Unix platform must be able to support perl 5 and Xlib (a
C compiler and a make utility are tremendously useful too). If you want to run
perl/Tk on another computer and simply have the display show up on yours
then all you need on your computer is an "X server" The long list of UNIX and
non-unix perl 5 ports, Tcl/Tk ports, and Perl/Tk ports that used to appear in
this FAQ has now moved to a separate web page at:

http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkPORT.html

______________________________________________________________________

7. Where is the Documentation?

A great deal of Perl/Tk documentation gets installed as part of the Tk
extension building process. Hence, a great deal of documentation is probably
residing on your computer already.

More documentation is "in the works": there are several books dealing with
perl/Tk in progress, an ongoing magazine column and a growing FAQ (the
document you are presently reading).

The additional material you may want to look at can be split into Perl/Tk, Perl,
Tcl/Tk, and X documentation categories:

Perl/Tk Specific Documentation
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The man pages
-------------

With up to date Tk build kits the various perl/Tk pod documents are converted
to your systems' helpfile format and installed as part of the perl/Tk "make
install" process. If you have a recent verion of perl/Tk try something like
man 3 Tk::Tk if this does not work check with you system administrator for
the proper MANPATH.

In your Tk build directory there should be a doc/ sub-directory in which
there are a number of .htm files (after you make install). These files were
originally Tcl/Tk man pages (from the man* sub-directories), but the *.htm
files have been converted to Perl syntax and rendered in HTML format. You
can use the Perl/Tk web browser to view them locally with a command like:

tkweb index.html

or you may view them on the web itself by installing them in a web-server
directory tree, or by pointing a browser at:

http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/doc/

The newsgroup
-------------

The newsgroup name is comp.lang.perl.tk and this FAQ will be periodically
posted to that group (as well as a few other newsgroups). The newsgroup
and/or the ptk mailing list are the appropriate places to post questions - yes
even simple ones! (Although answers may sometimes be long in coming ... :-(

The nTk/pTk mailing list
------------------------

The mailing list is an excellent supplement and complement to the newsgroup
comp.lang.perl.tk. All messages mailed to the list are forwarded to the
newsgroup. (But not all messages posted to the newsgroup are forwarded to
the list.) Some Perl/Tk experts only have access to e-mail.

The nTk/pTk Mailing List Archive is a very useful source of information too,
and is accesible at either

http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/

or via ftp at

ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/archives/

(both in the USA). You may search the contents of another ptk mailing list
hypertext archive thanks to a cgi-bin script written by Achim Bohnet in
Germany at:

http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/ptk/

You must subscribe to the mailing list to receive e-mail from the list. To
subscribe to the mailing list you can send mail to
[email protected] (i.e. <[email protected]>) with
the following command in the body of your e-mail message:

subscribe ptk joe.user@somewhere (Joe D. User)

To send a message to all recipients of the mailing list send e-mail to
<[email protected]>.

To remove yourself from the mailing list send e-mail to
[email protected] (i.e. <[email protected]>) with
the following command in the body of your e-mail message:

unsubscribe ptk joe.user@somewhere (Joe D. User)

Where instead of "joe.user@somewhere" you might very well like to
substitute another string of characters.

(Please note: one does not send unsubscribe messages to the ptk list. One does
send "unsubscribe ptk" messages to a special e-mail list administration
program. In the case of the ptk list you send to [email protected].
You must of course do this from the account and computer from which you
initially subscribed. In particular if you are viewing the hypertext version of
this FAQ you may not be able to unsubscribe from
[email protected] by following the mailto: hyperlinks - if your
web-browser account/computer is different from your subscribe to
e-mail-lists account/computer (the details of this might depend on which
browser you use though). Thank you for your cooperation on this.)

The demo programs
-----------------

Examine (and try running) the code in your Tk#/ build directory tree. You
might also be interested in test-running the code that gets installed:

o or perl5/site_perl/Tk/demos/ or
perl5/site_perl/Tk/demos/widget_lib/ directories (recent
Tk's).
o Tk#/ or perl5/Tk/demos/ or perl5/Tk/demos/widget_lib/
directories (older versions e.g. Tk-b8).

In order to determine where on your system the perl5/ directory is located
type the following one-line perl command (at your shell prompt - this is not a
line from a perl script):

perl -e 'print join("\n",@INC,"");'

If that command does not turn up a perl5/ directory then make sure that you
are running perl 5 with the following: perl -v (this too can simply be
entered at the shell prompt).

More on the pod & man documentation
-----------------------------------

[As previously mentioned a great number of Tcl/Tk man pages are converted
from *roff format to html format and are to be found within your Tk build
directory tree in the doc/ sub-directory. These documents form an
authoritative and extensive reference set for Perl/Tk.]

The raw pod files that come with the Tk kit are examples of the perl "plain old
documentation" format and are just about human readable as they are (e.g. you
may more, cat, or less them; or send them to a printer). Many (not all) of
the perl/Tk pod documents get are converted to *roff format and are installed
in you perl man page area as part of the perl/Tk build process.

If you have a recent version of perl/Tk try something like man 3 Tk::Tk. If
this does not work check your manual page path with

perl -MConfig -e 'print $Config{man1dir},"\n",$Config{man3dir},"\n"'

And if you still cannot find the manual pages check with your system
administrator for the proper MANPATH and/or Tk installation version.

"Raw" .pod (such as UserGuide.pod) can be viewed with the tkpod
hypertext pod viewer. Raw .pod may also be run through any one or more of a
large numbers of re-formatting perl filters. Such programs include pod2man,
pod2text, pod2html, pod2latex, etc. (these get installed when you install
perl). Other translators pod2texinfo, pod2fm, pod2pdf, etc., also exist.
Check a CPAN site for these scripts if you do not already have them.

A command line like the following (but subject to local variations) should
work for you:

tkpod site_perl/Tk/UserGuide.pod

or if you like Unix manual page style:

pod2man perl5/Tk/UserGuide.pod | nroff -man | more

(note that I am showing examples with almost full file path names - the
alternative would be to cd into the appropriate directory then type:

pod2man UserGuide.pod | nroff -man | more

There should even be a perl script to run that above command for you. It is
executed as:

perldoc UserGuide

Note that if there is pod like documentation in a perl module you may also
execute tkpod (or perldoc) on it as in:

tkpod ColorEditor.pm

(please note that unfortunately, not all .pm mod files have pod embedded.)

If you have misplaced your tkpod program but still want that GUI look and
feel (like xman) make the appropriate changes to the following script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Tk;
use Tk::Pod;
my $m = new MainWindow;
$m -> Pod(-file => 'ColorEditor.pm');
# or use command line path/filename:
# $m -> Pod(-file => $ARGV[0]);
MainLoop;

A miscellany of internet perl/Tk resources includes:
----------------------------------------------------

World Wide Web - perl/Tk man pages
http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/doc/index.html
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/doc/
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/pod/
The Perl/Tk Newsgroup
comp.lang.perl.tk
Perl Newsgroups
comp.lang.perl.misc
comp.lang.perl.anounce
comp.lang.perl.modules
Tcl Newsgroups
comp.lang.tcl
comp.lang.tcl.announce
Miscellaneous Newsgroups
comp.answers
news.answers
Perl/Tk FAQ-Archives (ftp sites) [Note: FAQ may be many separate files]
(see also CPAN sites)
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.lang.perl.tk
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/comp/lang/perl/tk
ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/perl-faq/ptk-faq
ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/ 130.199.54.188
ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/ptkFAQ.txt 130.199.54.188
ftp://ftp.wpi.edu/perl5/pTk-FAQ 130.215.24.209
ftp://perl.com/pub/perl/doc/ptkFAQ.gz 199.45.129.30
ftp://perl.com/pub/perl/doc/ptkFAQ.ps.gz 199.45.129.30
WWW-FAQ for perl/Tk
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkTOC.html
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkFAQ.html
World Wide Web - perl/Tk info sites
http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/
http://fxfx.com/kgr/compound/ (Perl Tk Compound Widget Page)
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkIMG.html (FAQ image supplement)
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/etc/
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/misc/
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/PNMTYAK/
http://www.mirai.com/wks/
The Mailing list
[email protected]
[email protected]

Perl Specific Documentation
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

There are a growing number Perl books available. A more complete
Perl-bibliographic discussion than that given here is available in the Perl
FAQ or at:

http://www.perl.com/perl/info/books.html

For Perl 5 there is (as of September 1996) a "New Camel" by Larry Wall, Tom
Christiansen, and Randal L. Schwartz, with Stephen Potter.

Programming Perl 2nd Edition
Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, & Randal L. Schwartz with Stephen
Potter
(c) 1996 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
ISBN 1-56592-149-6 (English)

A second edition of the Llama is due out soon too:

Learning Perl, 2ndEdition
Randal L. Schwartz
June 1997 (est.) O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
ISBN 1-56592-284-0 (English)

The two early Perl books by Schwartz and Wall are very helpful (even if they
do pertain to perl 4 and not 5. Beware that perl/Tk makes extensive use of perl
5 object-oriented features.):

Learning Perl (The Llama)
Randal L. Schwartz
Copyright (c) 1993 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
ISBN 1-56592-042-2 (English)
ISBN 2-84177-005-2 (French)
ISBN 3-930673-08-8 (German)
ISBN 4-89502-678-1 (Japanese)

Programming Perl (The Camel)
Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz
Copyright (c) 1991 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
ISBN 0-937175-64-1 (English)
ISBN 3-446-17257-2 (German) (Programmieren in Perl, translator:
Hanser Verlag)
ISBN 4-89052-384-7 (Japanese)

There is also some Perl5 (book material) information at:

http://www.metronet.com/1h/perlinfo/perl5/

Jon Orwant (the organizer of the comp.lang.perl.tk newgroup) has a book on
Perl 5 that has a chapter that discusses the Tk extension. (Please note that it is
mostly about Perl 5, there is a some discussion of four simple Perl/Tk
programs, but it is not a book wholly devoted to Perl/Tk.) It is nevertheless a
good introduction to object-oriented Perl 5 programming. The relevant info:

Perl 5 Interactive Course
Jon Orwant
(c) 1996 The Waite Group Press
A Division of SAMS Publishing, Corte Madera, CA USA
ISBN: 1-57169-064-6

The Perl 5 Quick Reference Guide (may require LaTeX for installation) can
be obtained from any CPAN ftp site. Detailed location information is also
available at the author's website:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvromans/perlref.html

The quick reference guide has also been turned into a small Nutshell
handbook:

Perl 5 Desktop Reference
Johan Vromans
Copyright (c) February 1996 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
ISBN: 1-56592-187-9; Order number: 1879

Eric F. Johnson has a book that discusses many perl5 for Unix vs. perl5 for
Windows NT issues. He includes a final chapter with extensive discussion of
the Tk extension and the ->Text() widget in particular. The information on
that book is:

Cross-Platform Perl
(c) 1996 Eric F. Johnson
MIS:Press/M&T Books
ISBN: 1-55851-483-X

Kamran Husain and Robert F. Breedlove have written a perl 5 book that
includes a chapter on Tk with some discussion of Menu()s. That book is:

Perl 5 Unleashed
Kamran Husain and Robert F. Breedlove
(c) 1996 Sams Publishing, Indianapolis, IN
ISBN: 0-672-30891-6

There is also a "Perl 5 How-To" book available that contains a great deal of
erroneous information about perl/Tk. Among other things that book wrongly
mentions that it is necessary to have a complete Tcl/Tk library installed on
one's system to compile the Tk extension to perl. (They are incorrect - it is
only necessary to have the appropriate perl version, libc and Xlib, the Tk
extension is otherwise "self-contained").

There is also a book on perl web client. It features a a chapter on perl/Tk that
was written by Nancy Walsh:

Web Client Programming with Perl
Clinton Wong
1st Edition March 1997
O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
ISBN: 1-56592-214-X; Order number: 214X

Additional book information may be found at Tom Christiansen's perl & cgi
books page, or at his Perl-related Book Reviews page.

The multi-part perl 5 manual pages are available (assuming they have been
installed in your MANPATH, type man perl, man perlmod etc.).

The perl 5 man pages are also available on the web at a number of locations. In
general the more recent the documentation the more helpful it is.

In addition to the CPAN ftp source sites, a miscellany of internet perl
resources includes:

Newsgroups
comp.lang.perl.misc
comp.lang.perl.announce
comp.lang.perl.modules
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi
comp.answers
news.answers
Perl FAQ-Archives (ftp sites) [Note: FAQ may be many separate files]
(as of 5.004 the FAQ ships in pod format with perl)
(see also the CPAN sites)
North America
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/perl-faq/
ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/perl-faq 192.48.96.9
ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/faq.gz 198.59.155.28
Europe
ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/NEWS.ANSWERS/perl-faq/ 131.211.80.17
ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/perl/FAQ 146.169.2.10
Gopher Perl FAQ
gopher://gopher.metronet.com/11/perlinfo/faq
WWW-FAQ for Perl
http://www.perl.com/perl/faq/
http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/perl/top.html
http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/perl/misc/top.html
http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/perl/announce/top.html
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/perl-faq/top.html
Perl for Win32 FAQ (discusses Win95)
http://www.perl.org/CPAN/doc/FAQs/win32/Perl_for_Win32_FAQ.html

Perl info sites
Gopher (gopher:70) perl info sites
USA
gopher://gopher.metronet.com/11h/perlinfo
World Wide Web (http:80) perl info sites
USA
http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Languages/Perl/index.html
http://www.perl.com/
http://www.khoros.unm.edu/staff/neilb/perl/home.html
http://www.khoros.unm.edu:80/staff/neilb/perl/metaFAQ/
http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/
http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/perl5.html (Perl 5)
http://www.eecs.nwu.edu/perl/perl.html
http://cesr39.lns.cornell.edu/public/perl/
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Perl.html
http://www.hermetica.com/technologia/unexec/
http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/perlWWW/
http://web.sau.edu/~mkruse/www/scripts/
http://orwant.www.media.mit.edu/the_perl_journal/
http://www.perl.com/Architext/AT-allperl.html
http://www.mispress.com/introcgi/
http://www.walrus.com/~smithj/webcan/
http://web.syr.edu/~chsiao05/cps600_project.html
http://www.iftech.com/classes/webdev/webdev_perl.htm
http://www.cc.iastate.edu/perlmenu/
http://www.ora.com/www/item/cgi_prog.html
UK
http://pubweb.nexor.co.uk/public/perl/perl.html
http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/web/form.html
Web references to Perl mailing lists
http://www.perl.com/perl/info/mailing-lists.html
http://www.nicoh.com/cgi-bin/lwgate/PERL5-PORTERS/
http://www.hut.fi/~jhi/perl5-porters.html
http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/

Tcl/Tk Specific Documentation
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The two Tcl/Tk books by Ousterhout and Welch are very good starting points
(you must however, translate the tcl-isms to perl in the sample scripts):

Tcl and the Tk Toolkit
John K. Ousterhout
Copyright (c) 1994 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
ISBN 0-201-63337-X (alk. paper)
LOC QA76.73.T44097 1994; 005.13'3--dc20

Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk
Brent Welch
Copyright (c) 1995 Prentice Hall
ISBN 0-13-182007-9

Within the tclsh or wish shells your manpath includes the tcl/tk man pages
(which may not be in your login MANPATH). Thus from the % prompt within
either shell type commands like:

% man -k Tk

The Tcl/Tk Reference Guide is also a source of useful information. Although
it's Tcl specific most perl/Tk commands can be, more or less, easily derived
from it. [Note that in perl/Tk the names of some functions and some
configuration options have changed slightly from their Tcl/Tk counterparts.
With recent versions of perl/Tk a great many functions start with an upper
case letter and continue with all lower case letters (e.g. there is a perl/Tk
Entry widget but no entry widget), and many configuration options are all
lower case (e.g. there is a perl/Tk highlightthickness option but no
highlightThickness option).] You may fetch the Tcl/Tk Reference Guide
(may require LaTeX for installation) from:

ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/TkMail/tkref-4.0.1.tar.gz 134.79.18.30
ftp://ftp.aud.alcatel.com/tcl/docs/tkref-4.0.1.tar.gz 198.64.191.10

There are a number of other Tcl/Tk resources on the internet including:

Newsgroups
comp.lang.tcl
comp.lang.tcl.announce
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi
comp.answers
news.answers
FAQ-Archive (ftp) [Note: Tcl FAQ may be many files, Tk FAQ is one file]
ftp://ftp.aud.alcatel.com/tcl/docs/ 198.64.191.10
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/tcl-faq
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/tcl-faq/tk
WWW-FAQ for Tcl/Tk
http://www.teraform.com/%7Elvirden/tcl-faq/
http://www.smartpages.com/faqs/tcl-faq/top.html
http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/tcl/top.html
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/tcl-faq/top.html
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/bngusenet/comp/lang/tcl/top.html
http://www.sco.com/Technology/tcl/Tcl.html
World Wide Web - Tcl/Tk info sites
Canada
http://web.cs.ualberta.ca/~wade/Auto/Tcl.html
UK
http://http2.brunel.ac.uk:8080/~csstddm/TCL2/TCL2.html
http://www.cis.rl.ac.uk/proj/TclTk/
USA
http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Languages/Tcl_Tk/index.html
http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl/docs.html
http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl/4.0.html
http://www.sco.com/Technology/tcl/Tcl.html
http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/
http://www.elf.org/tcltk-man-html/contents.html
Tcl/Tk - miscellaneous extensions
ftp://ftp.cme.nist.gov/pub/expect/
http://www.cs.hut.fi/~kjk/porttk.html
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ioi/tix/tix.html
http://www.ece.cmu.edu/afs/ece/usr/svoboda/www/th/homepage.html
http://www.tcltk.com/ [incr Tcl]
http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/TclX.html
http://www.eolas.com/eolas/webrouse/tcl.htm [WebWish]
http://www.se.cuhk.hk/~hkng2/big5tk/big5tk.html
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~jhobbs/work/ [BLT etc.]

X Documentation
+++++++++++++++

Tk certainly makes the generation of GUI code a lot easier than hard coding
things in traditional compiled languages such as C, C++, or Lisp. Nevertheless
there is a very large body of X documentation out there that will assist all
widget and GUI builders with issues of design, implementation, etc. Hence it is
good practice to be informed of the general design goals of X itself as well as
the other toolkits that have been built on top of X.

There are a number of X resources on the internet including:

Newsgroups
comp.windows.x
comp.windows.x.announce
comp.windows.x.apps
X FAQs:
ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/faqs/
X FAQ on the World Wide Web:
http://www.x.org/ftp/contrib/faqs/x-faq-multipart/x-faq-1
http://www.x.org/ftp/contrib/faqs/x-faq-multipart/x-faq-2
http://www.x.org/ftp/contrib/faqs/x-faq-multipart/x-faq-3
http://www.x.org/ftp/contrib/faqs/x-faq-multipart/x-faq-4
http://www.x.org/ftp/contrib/faqs/x-faq-multipart/x-faq-5
http://www.x.org/ftp/contrib/faqs/x-faq-multipart/x-faq-6
http://www.x.org/ftp/contrib/faqs/x-faq-multipart/x-faq-7
X Window System book info on the Web:
http://www.x.org/ftp/contrib/docs/Xbibliography.OReilly
http://www.ora.com/catalog/v1/
http://www.ora.com/catalog/v2/
http://www.ora.com/catalog/v3/
http://www.ora.com/catalog/v4/
http://www.ora.com/catalog/v5/
http://www.ora.com/catalog/v6a/
http://www.ora.com/catalog/v6b/
http://www.ora.com/catalog/v6c/
http://www.ora.com/catalog/r6/noframes.html
http://www.ora.com/oracom/prog/flanart.html
World Wide Web - X Window System info sites
http://www.x.org/
http://www.x.org/consortium/GettingX.html
http://www.x.org/consortium/x_info.html
http://www.x.org/consortium/R6.1doc/man/X11/
http://www.wolfram.com/~cwikla/widget/
http://www.zeta.org.au/~rosko/pigui.htm
http://www.rahul.net/kenton/xsites.html
http://www.unx.com/DD/txaCurrent.shtml

______________________________________________________________________

8. How do I write scripts in perl/Tk?

Start your script as you would any perl script (e.g. #!/usr/bin/perl,
#!/usr/local/bin/perl, #!/opt/bin/perl, [built static? then
#!/usr/bin/tkperl], whatever, see the perlrun(1) man page for more
information).
Throwing the -w warning switch is recommended.
The use of the statement use strict; is recommended.
Use of the statement use Tk; is required.

A simple "Hello World!" widget script could be written as follows:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Tk;

my $main = new MainWindow;
$main->Label(-text => 'Hello World!'
)->pack;
$main->Button(-text => 'Quit',
-command => sub{exit}
)->pack;
MainLoop;

The MainLoop; statement is the main widget event handler loop and is
usually found in perl/Tk scripts (usually near the end of the main procedure
after the widgets have been declared and packed). MainLoop; is actually a
function call and you may see it written as MainLoop();, &Tk::MainLoop;,
&Tk::MainLoop();, etc.

Note the use of the -> infix dereference operator. Most things in calls to
perl/Tk routines are passed by reference.

Note also the use of the => operator which is simply a synonym for the comma
operator (well it is a bit more than that :-). In other words, the arguments that
get passed to Label and Button in the above example are good old perl
associative arrays (perl 5 people prefer to call them "hashes" however).
Indeed, we might have written the above as:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Tk;

my $main = new MainWindow;
$main->Label(-text , 'Hello World!'
)->pack;
$main->Button(-text , 'Quit',
-command , sub{exit}
)->pack;
MainLoop;

Or even as:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Tk;
my $main = new MainWindow;

my %hello = ('-text','Hello World!');
my %quit_com = ('-text' => 'Quit', '-command' => sub{exit});

$main->Label(%hello)->pack;
$main->Button(%quit_com)->pack;
MainLoop;

Note however, that the use of the => in the first method of writing this script
makes it look more "Tcl-ish" :-).

Lastly, we note the extensive use of the my function in most perl/Tk programs.
my is roughly equivalent to local in Perl 4 - but is purported to be "faster and
safer" as well as much more strictly local in scope. See perlfunc(1)
manpage for more information on my.

Other examples of code may be found in the perl5/Tk/demos/ directory
and in perl5/Tk/demos/widget_lib/.

(A variant on this scipt called hello is available in the file
perl5/Tk/demos/hello in your own pTk distribution. Also, Source code
for this and other examples from UserGuide.pod may be found at
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/pod/. To load code from the web save as a
local filename, edit the first line to point to your perl interpreter, then: chmod
u+x filename, then execute: filename.)

______________________________________________________________________

9. What widget types are available under perl/Tk?

The following Tk widget primitives are available under perl/Tk:

o Button
o Canvas
o Checkbutton
o Entry
o Frame
o Label
o Listbox
o Menu
o Menubutton
o Message
o Radiobutton
o Scale
o Scrollbar
o Text
o Toplevel

The following are Tix widget primitives available under perl/Tk:

o HList
o InputOnly

There are (a lot of) other [compound|composite|constructs] available too. You
can also synthesize new widgets out of these primitives using perl5's
object-oriented multiple inheritance features. You can even build entirely new
widget primitives from raw C (XS) code then use and re-use that. (Perl 5 is
extremely configurable.)

A good introduction to the primitives and how they may be used in
conjunction with each other may be found in the widget demo script. Note
that all the widget demos have a "Show Code" button. To help figure out what
is happening in the script you may, when the window appears, edit the text and
instrument the code with print statements and then simply press "Rerun
Demo". Another place to see examples of the primitives (on the web) is at the
image supplement to this FAQ at the following URL:

http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkIMG.html