lichtkind

As I prepare the material for my 5h WxPerl training course in Pisa (attendees are always welcome :)) I like to post some information you may find useful if you're a WxPerl user. Today I started to prepare my slides, which will cover only the theoretical part/first chapter. After that we will just deal with code that we do run live. For this I prepare many scripts which are snapshots of an real app in development. After doing this kind of teaching last year in Essing at the German WxPerl workshop, I think this time I will focus more on building a real application, rather than just playing with little examples that highlight corner cases and typical mistakes.

All students will get all the material, like the scripts a sheet with tips and links, but also some additional docs like this WxPerlTablet I once wrote in English and German, that will also be enriched until Pisa.

There are no offcial WxPerl docs (see here) only WxWidgets docs where some of the things done differently in Perl are marked (see here). Even if WxWidgets now has an improved doc made by doxygen it's still not the best i can imagine and it's incorrect in many cases. Some events have different syntax, many methods are rightfully missing, many classes are missing on purpose because we have in Perl arrays/strings/Regex/FTP/XML/etc of our own.

The Perl Foundation rightfully put some money to improve that situation but the result are only a few pages like this which needed a lot of work and really help newcomers to get into the matter, but cover only some core classes.

So I finally decided to put a long held dream into reality. I create a class/hierarchy based viewer called Wx::Docular, which will arrive on CPAN really soon (its already a full blown installable CPAN package). I'm also very happy to see that i have already a guy (Jochen Plumeyer) helping me, another showed interest. This guy wants to write a script which parses the actual WxPerl XS code so you can be sure: when WxDocular displays it, it's there under this name. The texts will be merged with the also parsed Wx docs until we write better texts of our own. Maybe I add some intro and overview texts for better navigation. With class categories, extended find, bookmarks, collective cut'n paste and some more I expect that this program will provide much more comfort than all docs we have today.

Because the content is held in a YAML (maybe also JSON later) structure Docular could show docs for many other projects or even Perl itself. I also hope someone writes a website that uses this YAML/JSON to create something like that.

My larger talk (50min) in Pisa explores how to simplify the Wx syntax, but that's a topic for another post. thank you for reading.