Ok so you like it. Good for you. Are we supposed to disagree with you? Were you expecting that?

The only one I tried was one I started working on. I once knocked out a basic HTML->TK converter. You fed it an HTML form and it would ouput the code to create it in TK. You just had to fill in the callbacks. If I ever get time, I should pick it up again.

How do you feel about such tools? Keep in mind that use of such tools embodies both laziness and impatience in the programmer.

That's a strange way of asking a question. It seems you are already trying to defend yourself. Are you looking for an argument of some sorts? Does it matter how we feel? If I said such tools give me the urge to dance with a duck, what does that mean to you? Or is this question more like a Rorschach test (you know, the one where they show you an inkblot on a paper that was folded right after being stained, and they ask what you see in it (an inkblot, what else?)), and your question has a deeper meaning? (And the urge to dance with a duck means that later in life you'll have difficulties in relationships with oranges),

Abigail

I usually don't like things like Gui builders, because they tend to generate code that's quite unmanageable - it works fine as long as you don't have to touch it, but if you have to, it's a royal PITA. I have never used Prima, so maybe that's different.

My reasoning is though is that if you use them, you barely have to know how to work with the code that they generate, and don't have to learn the module.

Personnally i'm using Qt designer for the design of the GUI. My view is that a GUI builders help you to increase your productivity. I don't see where is the interest of searching one hour during the good position of your widget, it's not the interesting thing. I prefer to loose time to read documentation to learn how to do something more interesting. Moreover i'm not sure that is possible to create a GUI without having to know to write one manually at all :-) Finally, i think that once you know how to make a GUI it's not really producive to repeat X times same things just for ethical reasons.

A GUI is by nature a visual thing, not a text thing. Some problem domains are more suited for a WYSIWYG approach, and this is one of them.

For you to be effective, the GUI builder shouldn't create code for building the GUI. It should let you design the GUI, and then create the GUI for you. No code.

/J

If you keep presentation and logic separate, you can have the best of both worlds. Build the application logic and use the gui builder to build an interface which calls the right methods in response to interface events. This way you save the time you would use in manually constructing the interface but still keep complete control over the guts of the application and the way they are written.

Cheers

Antonio

Such things are self evidently _good_things_. You can't blame the tools if the results are crap. There will aways be people capable of using the finest tools to turn out rubbish. But with easy tools there will be more doing it, which means although theres more rubbish, theres also more great stuff.

They said easy to use synthesisers and audio tools would ruin music. Theres a lot more music, lots of its very bad, but the best of it is better than ever.
They said simple scripted open games engines would ruin the quality of games design. There has never been such a wealth of creative activity from the mod scene pushing the field forward
Tools that popularise a practice are to be welcomed. They move the programmer one step further up the ladder of abstaction and closer to a wider less specialised parlence they can share with more people. Personally I would probably use such a tool. I take no pleasure in GUI design once a program functions. I think the equivilent Motif builder I used years ago was called Masai.
btw, it goes without saying I'm with Antonio on this, a properly constructed program should operate independently of its interface, think loose coupling. It should, in the best of cases be trivial to swap out a CLI for a GUI, or file/config based interface to script the thing. If your gubbins has all the right hooks, who cares how the data gets to and from it?

I use GUI builders from time to time.
I beleive any GUI builder makes quite good by helping user, but you must not require from it doing things that it was not designed to do...

As long as Perl does not have its own native GUI builder, I used workarounds.

Earlier I had a technique to use C++ Builder to design GUI and call Perl from C code (number of small scripts as shortcuts, embedded Perl and nothing more compilcated)

Now I use a technique of using VTCL and invoking it from Perl using Tcl::Tk module.
I described this earlier, please see it at node 351324

I advice latter one as a way to go...

Courage, the Cowardly Dog

I'd like to explain my point of view. There are two ways to work with such tools.

1. A bottom-up way and
2. a top-down way.

If you go the bottom-up way you have to learn how to use all those widgets - step by step. At the end you know how everything goes and using the GUI builder just accelerates your work. You know what you're doing.

If you prefer the top-down way, you use the GUI builder without a clue about the backgrounds. Of course you're learning a way to handle your tasks, but you miss details. You start fast but you'll never reach "top speed".

It's your decision to choose how to work with those tools.

neniro

Usually GUI builders produce bad source code, and even the produced GUI layout is not useable for most applications. Why? Most GUI builders only allow pixel exact layout, and not relative layout. In Tk terms, the layout code produced is using the "place" geometry manager, and not the "pack" or "grid" geometry managers. This works fine if all application users have the same font and screen settings, and if internationalization is not needed, but fails miserably if this is not the case.

Last time I looked at Prima the GUI builder was solving the problem by ignoring the user's font setting (as for example set by .Xdefaults on an X11 system), but forcing it's own fonts, resulting in ugly scaled fonts on my system.