Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Wx 0.9921 Released

Wx-0.9921 has been uploaded to CPAN with the addition of support for the Inter-Process Communication classes wxServer, wxClient and wxConnection.

It is implemented using DDE on Windows and sockets on other platforms. You can use UNIX sockets or INET sockets on none Windows platforms - but UNIX sockets are recommended for many reasons.

One caveat to usage on Windows is that prior to Alien::wxWidgets 0.64 wxWidgets on Windows was built without IPC support so if you want IPC on Windows you will need to install and build wxWidgets / Alien::wxWidgets again before building Wx. On other platforms your existing wxWidgets install should be OK.

Many of the methods in wxWidgets take parameters of the style 'databuffer, databuffersize'. For the wxPerl implementation there is no 'databuffersize' param.

The wxPerl methods are listed in the brief wxPerl IPC guide and demonstrated in the example ipc script that includes code for both a server and a client application.

Tested for wxWidgets 2.8.12 and 2.9.4 on Windows, Linux and MacOSX, it provides useful lightweight bi-directional messaging between wxPerl applications.

Note: don't use it for DDE conversations with MSExcel or whatever. You should use Win32::OLE instead.

The changes entries since the 0.9918 release are:

0.9919 - 0.9921 Sun Apr 14 2013
    - Makefile checks for supported Wx version
    - Fixed wxUSE_DATAVIEWCTRL constant ( rt#84566 )
    - wrapped wxRegionIterator
    - wrapped IPC - wxConnection / wxServer / wxClient

Package updates for Citrus Perl 5.16.3 have been released. Updated PPM's for ActivePerl have also been published.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Wx 0.9918 Released

Wx version 0.9918 has been released to CPAN.


  • Added missing GetItemFont / SetItemFont for Wx::ListCtrl
  • Fixed wxFontEnumerator GetEncodings / GetFacenames  ( thanks to Marton Papp )
  • Wrapped wxFontEnumerator callbacks

Wx::Demo 0.20 has also been released including a Wx::FontEnumerator example.
Alien::wxWidgets 0.63 has been released including some back-ported patches partially fixing some Wx::DirDialog issues with the latest Linux distributions.

To bring wxPerl world up to date, Citrus Perl has a new release including all of the above and the ActivePerl PPMs have been updated to the latest versions.

These binary releases are updated from version 0.9912 so included several more changes

Thursday, March 7, 2013

wxPerl Tweets

Notifications, snippets, comments and other stuff that may not make it to the wxPerl blog will now be tweeted by @wxPerl. Do the smart thing and follow!

wxPerl Online Pages Update

To coincide with the resurrection of the wxPerl Wiki I have updated the web presence for wxPerl. The new home page is at www.wxperl.it but all existing links should redirect OK at present.

Mattia's original Manual has been re-published as the wxPerl Primer and the main documentation and support links have all been re-published at the new site.

Still 'to do' are the page listing applications built with or for use with wxPerl and Mattia's wxPerl tutorial. I think that  the Wiki might be a better home for the list of applications and users. It is better if those links are updated by the application owners themselves.

For the tutorials, I have created examples.wxperl.it that is integrated with the main site. I'll be posting the tutorials there in early course.

I chose a blog format as I'd like to make regular postings about wxPerl in addition to posting about updates and releases. It seemed the logical format. It is much simpler for me to manage than the existing pages.

The original wxPerl pages have not disappeared and can be accessed at wxperl.sourceforge.net/home.html. I have also placed a link to the old pages on the new site.

Hopefully as this format makes it easier for me to post to and updated the site, I'll be making regular additions in the future.