NAME

ZooZ.pl - A Perl/Tk GUI builder in pure Perl/Tk.

SYNOPSIS

    % perl ZooZ.pl

DESCRIPTION

ZooZ is a GUI builder for Perl/Tk written in pure Perl/Tk. It has the following features:

• Intuitive interface.
• Support for a wide variety of widgets.
• Ability to save/load projects.
• Ability to dump stand-alone Perl code.
• Ability to dump code as a Perl module in the form of a Perl/Tk mega widget.
• Includes a simple IDE for defining variables and subroutines.

STATUS AND LIMITATIONS

ZooZ is an on-going effort, and will probably stay so for a long time. At this stage, though, I consider it to be very usable. There are some major limitations though. For a comprehensive list of missing features, you can look at the Progress.txt file that comes in the root directory of the distribution. If you think there is something else that should be included in that file, then drop me a note.

REQUIREMENTS

To run ZooZ, you need Tk804, which in turn needs Perl 5.8 or better. I will probably support Tk800 sometime in the future, in which case any Perl5 version will be supported.

In addition Tk::ToolBar is required. Again, I will probably make this optional in a future release.

OPTIONAL COMPONENTS

Tk::CodeText is optional. If present it will be used in the simple IDE to highlight user-entered Perl code. If missing, a regular Tk::Text will be used.

TIPS

• You can create a project, then save the code as a Perl Module with a .pm extension. This will create a composite mega widget, with the same name as your project, but with any non-alphanumeric characters switched to underscores. For example, Project 1.5 will be changed to Project_1_5. You can then use this in a larger program as a regular widget.

  For example, if you dumped your module into myMod.pm, and your project was called Project 1.5, then you would do this in your main code:

      use myMod;
      my $project = $parent->Project_1_5->pack;

  Note also that the mega widget will Advertise() every widget in your project. So, if your project had a canvas called Canvas1, you can access it like this:

      my $cv = $project->Subwidget('Canvas1');

• ZooZ automatically defines a hash called %ZWIDGETS that holds the project's widgets. This allows the user to access any widget inside of a callback via $ZWIDGETS{WidgetName} where WidgetName is the name of the widget.
• You can click on the row and column numbers to configure their properties.
• If you want a row or column to take up more space than it currently does, then increase its greediness. Remember that widgets are confined to the space of the grids they occupy.

BUGS

You tell me! If you think you found a bug, or you want to discuss anything ZooZ-related, then please drop me a note at aqumsieh@cpan.org.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I'm indebted to everyone on comp.lang.perl.tk for constructive comments and bug reports. Many people also emailed me with bugs and suggestions. It is much appreciated.

COPYRIGHTS

Copyright 2004-2005 - Ala Qumsieh.

This program is distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.

The use of the Camel image with the topic of Perl is a trademark of O'Reilly Media, Inc. Used with permission.