Strawberry Perl

Faxmachinen

I'm rewriting a Perl CLI tool by popular demand, and I would like it to have a GUI. Most of my users will be on Windows and have minimal knowledge of CLIs. To make the installation as simple as possible, I'd like to skip the usual GUI libraries and just make a local WUI. I only have experience with ActiveState Perl, and it does not allow redistribution under the free license. So before I replace it with Strawberry Perl, I have some questions:

Can I redistribute Strawberry Perl for free? What are the terms?
Does Strawberry Perl come with all the CGI goodness?
Does Strawberry Perl come with CPAN::Shell and everything required to make it work (nmake etc.)? Or does it have its own package manager?
Using a server for a client-side application seems a bit overkill; is there a better way to pipe HTML straight into a browser?

Thanks.

blakeyrat

Not answering your question, I know... but does it have to stay Perl?

Faxmachinen

Not really, Perl is just my favourite swiss army knife. Racket actually has the best GUI toolkit ever, but I'm not looking forward to twiddling binary data in that language.

Weng

@Faxmachinen said:

is there a better way to pipe HTML straight into a browser?

Save to disk. Open. file:/// is your friend.

Faxmachinen

Good point. I'm not sure how I would feed user input back to the Perl script though.

sinistral

Besides the Strawberry Perl site itself, one of the best places for Perl related information is Perl Monks: http://www.perlmonks.org

You should also use the Super Search feature to rummage though the archives, because all of this has probably been posted.

You can ask questions anonymously if you choose, and the people there have tons of experience with Strawberry and other MS Windows-centric Perl distros.

Pyrexkidd

Can I redistribute Strawberry Perl for free? What are the terms?

Yes, as it is released under the GPL.

The GNU General Public License v3.0 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

2. Does Strawberry Perl come with all the CGI goodness?

The CGI modules, or the ability to execute CGI code?

--I don't believe I had to download the modules to use them.

--StrawberryPerl can interpret CGI or any valid Perl code, consult your Web Server documentation for enabling Perl CGI support.

3. Does Strawberry Perl come with CPAN::Shell and everything required to make it work (nmake etc.)? Or does it have its own package manager?

Yes, you can even invoke CPAN from the command line:

C:\cpan

4. Using a server for a client-side application seems a bit overkill; is there a better way to pipe HTML straight into a browser?

I'm not sure what you mean here, if it is a client side application how are you using a server... Wouldn't that make it a server side application?

Do you want to run an application on the client computer, or are you trying to host an application on the web?

Faxmachinen

Excellent, thank you.

@Pyrexkidd said:

I'm not sure what you mean here, if it is a client side application how are you using a server... Wouldn't that make it a server side application?
Do you want to run an application on the client computer, or are you trying to host an application on the web?

I would like to run the application on the client computer. The server would be a HTTP server on the local loopback. With access to CPAN::Shell I could easily download a simple HTTP server module through that though.