Professional IDE for a cross-platform Perl application

[Sherm Pendley]

Framework is synonymous for an Integrated Development Environment,

No, it is not. Framework is synonymous for a collection of one or more
libraries. You can (and I often do) use various frameworks with plain old
make files - no IDE needed.

An IDE is an Integrated Development Environment. Editor, debugger, compiler
(if one is needed) all in one environment.

Some IDEs are made to support specific frameworks - Visual Studio and Xcode
come to mind. Other IDEs, such as Eclipse and Emacs, are language- and
framework-agnostic.

There are also products like Visual Basic and Delphi where the IDE and frame-
work happen to be delivered in the same package, and rather tightly bound to
one another. That has no bearing on the definition of the terms, it's just a
decision by the author to package the two pieces together and market the
result as a single product.

sherm--

 

[Sherm Pendley]

Absolutely not. An IDE is GUI application that provides editing,
debugging, project management and other facilities.

It's not necessarily a GUI app. I'd consider Emacs an IDE. It has all of
the requisites above - an editor (duh), an interface to gdb, interfaces
to version control and build tools, etc.

And Emacs *definitely* has the "other facilities" requirement covered.

sherm--

 

[Bob]

Perl/TK is a very professional framework.

Sinan, Perl and TK are languages. An IDE, on the other hand, is a
framework.
This is plain English! Let us not disagree on it!

Bob

 

[Bob]

Re: John Bokma

AFAIK, this is just possible. Another option, if you want to go the Perl
way, might be wxWindows/wxWidgets. I have little experience with Tk, but
do know that wx has support for tables/spreadsheet constructs in a Window.

Now this is a good news!

AFAIK you have to make a version for each platform, since perl itself is
not portable. (perl, not Perl)

....what would be the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?

Yes, but if reverse engineering is an issue, you probably shouldn't
release the program

I spent ten years to design an algorithm that I would rather not get
stolen
in ten minutes by reading the .exe. I appreciate your humor, but things
are sad in real life. You invest a lot of time (and thus money) in
something,
then someone walks in and takes it away from you. I am not Bill
Gates...

Java, and maybe C# (MONO).
Yes...


You're mistaken.

No, I was hoping... ;-)

Depends a lot on the programmer. It seems that a lot of Java programmers
mistake garbage collection and Swing for a free programmer that comes with
the language.

I did not get that one.

Bob

 

[Bob]

No, it is not. Framework is synonymous for a collection of one or more
libraries. You can (and I often do) use various frameworks with plain old
make files - no IDE needed.

OK, I understand now.

An IDE is an Integrated Development Environment. Editor, debugger, compiler
(if one is needed) all in one environment.

Some IDEs are made to support specific frameworks - Visual Studio and Xcode
come to mind. Other IDEs, such as Eclipse and Emacs, are language- and
framework-agnostic.

There are also products like Visual Basic and Delphi where the IDE and frame-
work happen to be delivered in the same package, and rather tightly bound to
one another. That has no bearing on the definition of the terms, it's just a
decision by the author to package the two pieces together and market the
result as a single product.

OK. I still think it is a linguistic adventure, but I am happy to
acknowledge
the IDE vs framework slang if this helps to identify them with
precision.

Bob

 

[John Bokma]

Sinan, Perl and TK are languages. An IDE, on the other hand, is a
framework.
This is plain English! Let us not disagree on it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework

Feel free to fix it.

 

[John Bokma]

Re: John Bokma
....

...what would be the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?

Perl is the language, perl is the executable.

I spent ten years to design an algorithm that I would rather not get
stolen
in ten minutes by reading the .exe. I appreciate your humor,

I was not joking. You can protect your algorithm with a patent though, but
never by obfuscating.

I did not get that one.

There are quite some programmers who think garbage collection etc. means
that they don't have to think anymore.

 

[John Bokma]

OK. I still think it is a linguistic adventure, but I am happy to
acknowledge
the IDE vs framework slang if this helps to identify them with
precision.

Eclipse is an IDE, and often referred to as a framework as well (because
you can add your own stuff to it in a very easy manner). However, when
using the IDE you probably are not referring to it as a framework.

IIRC Eclipse comes also with a bunch of (Java) libraries, which can be
considered a framework as well.

 

[Sherm Pendley]

Re: John Bokma


...what would be the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?

That's a Frequently Asked Question - have a look at "perldoc -q difference".

If you package up a Windows build of perl (the interpreter) along with some
portable Perl code to make an .exe, you can't expect the result to run on
Solaris simply because the un-packaged Perl source code was portable. That
kind of portability goes out the window as soon as you produce a platform-
specific binary.

I spent ten years to design an algorithm that I would rather not get
stolen
in ten minutes by reading the .exe. I appreciate your humor

John's not joking. Well, he might be, but if so the joke is funny because
it's true.

A PAR or perl2exe package will not protect your code from reverse engineering.
But then, neither will using a C, C++, Java, or any other compiler. If it's
available to the public, it can (and undoubtedly will) be hacked.

Most retailers take a certain percentage of theft as a given - they even have
a term for it: "shrinkage". They learned long ago that the effort needed to
eliminating those last few points would actually cost them more than the lost
merchandise itself costs.

There's a lesson there for software publishers. Piracy *will* happen. By all
means take reasonable precautions, but don't lose sleep over the fact that a
handful of skilled "crackers" will be able to see your code.

The few "pirates" I've known personally were just collectors anyway, who
amassed thousands of disks worth of software they never used. They wouldn't
have bought the software anyway - it would have cost them $millions - so I
don't think that sort of thing has much effect on the bottom line.

I did not get that one.

I think what John's saying is, blame the programmer, not the language. Java
can be used by a good programmer to write tight, efficient code.

Bad Java programmers tend to believe that they can feed their compiler a
mess of fat, bloated code and it will magically be able to produce a slim,
efficient executable out of it. And when it fails to do so, they'll blame
the language, the runtime, the libraries, the phase of the moon, solar
flares - anything that doesn't require them to admit their own mistakes.

Come to think of it, that's bad programmers in general. Nothing Java-specific
about it.

sherm--

 

[A. Sinan Unur]

@b68g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

[ Please do not strip attributions ]

Sinan, Perl and TK are languages.

Perl is a language.

Tk is a toolkit.

Perl/Tk is the Tk toolkit implementation for Perl.

An IDE, on the other hand, is a framework.
This is plain English! Let us not disagree on it!

If you insist on using terms incorrectly, I don't see how we cannot
disagree.

Sinan

 

[A. Sinan Unur]

It's not necessarily a GUI app.

Agreed. Excuse the slopiness on my part, please.

Sinan

 

[Ch Lamprecht]

Re: A. Sinan Unur




Framework is synonymous for an Integrated Development Environment,
or IDE, which is the term that I see more often. Some people intend the

IDE for an editor that assists you with the different files and their
dependences,
other intend it for a GUI editor, and other intend it for a combination
of the two
with the added benefit of porting and package generation. We are
talking
about professional frameworks, of course.

Bob

use Smalltalk

Christoph

 

[Bob]

To summarise,

the most useful information so far is the link to Wikipedia's page on
"frameworks", which I have just updated with a link to the Mono
project.

Concerning the linguistic adventure on IDE vs framework, the above page
by Wikipedia is classified as follows (bottom of the page):

"Category: Integrated development environments"

This means that I am right in considering IDEs as a more general
cathegory, as "frameworks" are indeed a component of IDEs.

Let us move forward, or I shall rather say backwards to my original
post. Do you have any experience about IDEs that generate
cross-platform executables?

Bob

 

[David Squire]

To summarise,

the most useful information so far is the link to Wikipedia's page on
"frameworks", which I have just updated with a link to the Mono
project.

Concerning the linguistic adventure on IDE vs framework, the above page
by Wikipedia is classified as follows (bottom of the page):

"Category: Integrated development environments"

This means that I am right in considering IDEs as a more general
cathegory, as "frameworks" are indeed a component of IDEs.

If you read the Wikipedia page on IDEs
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment) you
will see that it says right at the start:

"IDEs normally consist of a source code editor, a compiler and/or
interpreter, build-automation tools, and (usually) a debugger. Sometimes
a version control system and various tools to simplify the construction
of a GUI are integrated as well."

which is in complete agreement with what people here have been saying.
GUI construction and other framework-type elements are an optional
extra, not part of the core idea of an IDE.


DS

 

[Bob]

which is in complete agreement with what people here have been saying.
GUI construction and other framework-type elements are an optional
extra, not part of the core idea of an IDE.

Not at all. Wikipedia's page is in complete disagreement with them. By
cathegorizing A in B, for any A and B, one means that B is more general
than A, or A is a special case or part of B. Wikipedia says that A (the
framework) is part of B (the IDE). What people have been saying here is
that A (the framework) is "not part of" B (the IDE), which is exactly
the negation of the above statement.

Bob

 

[David Squire]

Not at all. Wikipedia's page is in complete disagreement with them. By
cathegorizing A in B, for any A and B, one means that B is more general
than A, or A is a special case or part of B. Wikipedia says that A (the
framework) is part of B (the IDE).

It does not say that. It says that an IDE *can* include a framework, not
that it must - in the text, not in the categories (and a simple tree
of categories cannot handle nuances such as this, unless the arcs are
labelled).

What people have been saying here is
that A (the framework) is "not part of" B (the IDE), which is exactly
the negation of the above statement.

.... but the original statement is a misrepresentation.

You have conveniently snipped the text of the definition itself, which
contradicts your reading of the category tree. IDEs and frameworks are
separate things. An IDE can exist without including a framework of
libraries etc., though some IDEs do incorporate framework elements.
Likewise, a framework can exist without an IDE - I don't need to use an
IDE to use the Tk GUI building framework, for example.

The statements "A can include B" and "A must include B" are not equivalent.


DS

 

[Bob]

David, the Wikipedia reads correctly. There is no further ground for
misunderstandings. Also, the word "Integrated" in "Integrated
Development Environment" should (must) ring you a bell. Your
disagreement on "A is part of B" vs "B can be a part of A" is just
playing with words.

Bob

 

[Bob]

Unless I spot anything better, I am settling for wxWidgets. I think
I'll port the application's GUI from tk to wxWidgets, and follow the
wyoGuide to make the application platform-independent.

Thank you,
Bob

 

[Sherm Pendley]

David, the Wikipedia reads correctly.

Yes it does, and it says that your definition is wrong.

You're being childish, and you'll get no further help from me.

sherm--

 

[David Squire]

David, the Wikipedia reads correctly. There is no further ground for
misunderstandings. Also, the word "Integrated" in "Integrated
Development Environment" should (must) ring you a bell. Your
disagreement on "A is part of B" vs "B can be a part of A" is just
playing with words.

Fine Bob, you can be right, and the rest of the world can be wrong.
We'll get along just fine.

Bye.