A subset of Perl/Tk has been ported to Trolltech's Qt and Qt/Embedded frameworks, and released under a BSD license by a software company in Hamburg, Germany. FrogLogic says Perl/Tk-over-Qt (“Pq”) can give Perl/Tk applications a more native look and improved performance, while retaining a familiar API.

Perl/Tk is a Perl port of the Tk (tool-kit) GUI widget set, which was originally written for use with the Tcl (tickle) scripting language. Both Perl/Tk and the original Tcl/Tk aim to simplify the process of wrapping lightweight graphical user interfaces (GUIs) around scripts.

FrogLogic specializes in selling and creating software around Trolltech's Qt and Qt/Embedded graphics frameworks. Qt is a cross-platform development platform that aims to let developers maintain a single source tree from which binaries with a native look and feel can be compiled for a variety of target platforms. Qt/Embedded is a lightweight windowing system available for Linux and other embedded platforms.

According to FrogLogic, Pq currently implements most of Perl/Tk's basic widget set, allowing small- and mid-size Perl/Tk applications to be ported immediately to it simply by changing “use Tk” statements to “use Pq”. Missing widgets and properties can be added by extending existing C++ classes, a service available from the company on a contract basis.

Pq currently requires Qt/Embedded 2.3 or Qt/X11 3.x. It is written in fast, memory-efficient C++ code, FrogLogic claims, and provides an API familiar to previous users of Perl/Tk and Tcl/Tk. It provides a more modern, native, polished look and feel customized via Qt for each supported platform, the company says.

More details are available at a Pq page on FrogLogic's website, here.

FrogLogic has previously offered Squish, a testing framework for Qt and Qt/Embedded GUIs.

 
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