Windows CPAN Testers, your help please...
I recently blogged about Ask, my new(ish) module for interacting with users via STDIN/STDOUT, a GUI, or whatever means possible.
Writing GUI code in Perl unfortunately requires you to compile non-core modules such as Gtk2, Wx or Tk. There is an alternative no-compilation-required approach though: most modern Linux and BSD distributions ship with (or at least package for separate download) a program called Zenity. Zenity is a tool for adding basic GUI dialogue boxes to shell scripts. You call it like this:
zenity --file-selection
And it will display a standard file chooser. Once a file is chosen, Zenity will print the file path to STDOUT and then exit.
Ask provides Ask::Zenity, a wrapper around Zenity, and will fall back to that if Wx, Gtk2, Tk, etc are not available. However, none of this really addresses Windows...
So I've dug out an old copy of VB.NET and written a Zenity-like tool for Windows, called Wenity (I know, great name). Its functionality is mostly a subset of Zenity.
Wenity is now on CPAN as Alien-Wenity 0.000_01. I'd appreciate some Windows users testing this distribution to see how easy/successful it is to install.
I'm tobyink on CPAN, IRC and PerlMonks. 
Hi,
I have a cpan smoker and it seems to test succesful. It installs here:
Directory of C:\strawberry\perl\site\lib\auto\share\dist\Alien-Wenity
23-01-2013 14:39 40.960 Wenity.exe
1 File(s) 40.960 bytes
Hi,
I have a cpan smoker and it seems to test succesful. It installs here:
Directory of C:\strawberry\perl\site\lib\auto\share\dist\Alien-Wenity
23-01-2013 14:39 40.960 Wenity.exe
1 File(s) 40.960 bytes
Why is the Wenity.exe not installed in bin/ ?
Why is the source missing from the distribution? Do you have something to hide? Don't we have already enough malwares on Windows?
Have you seen Zenity for Windows? http://www.placella.com/software/zenity/
Also, someone beat you to the Wenity name. It's a Zenity clone written in Java. http://kksw.zzl.org/wenity.html
I'll try installing Alien::Wenity just as soon as my cpan upgrades finish.
It installed just fine for me.
Hurray!
It's not installed in "bin/" because it's not an end-user app; it's designed to be called by Perl scripts to provide dialogue boxes.
The path to Wenity.exe can be obtained using "Alien::Wenity->path".
The full source for the binary is linked to in the "SEE ALSO" section in the pod.
I didn't see much point in bundling the source code, as VB source is pretty opaque stuff, consisting largely of machine-generated XML blobs.
I have indeed seen Zenity for Windows, but it uses GTK, and I wanted something a little more native.