May 2006
Beginner
298 pages
6h 51m
English
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Hack #40. Package Standalone Perl Applications
Distribute a full Perl application to users.
The three main ways to distribute an application are via an installer, via a standalone executable, or via source. These choices vary a lot across platforms. Windows users prefer installers, especially .msi files. Mac fans are quite happy with .app files, which usually come in disk images. Most Linux variants use installers (.deb and .rpm) but others prefer source.
What if your application is a Perl program?
Perl may seem like an atypical GUI language, but it does have bindings for GUI toolkits including Tk, wxWidgets, Qt, and GTK. Perl can be useful in the GUI realm as a rapid-development foundation or simply to add a couple of dialogs to a mostly background process. One great entry barrier, however, is that most platforms do not bundle these GUI toolkits with Perl—and some platforms do not bundle Perl at all. Though there are packaged distributions of Perl itself, the add-on modules that usually accompany any sophisticated Perl project are typically source code. This poses a problem for most Windows users and many Mac users for whom this is too low-level a task. Only the sysadmin-rich world of Linux and Unix regularly tolerates sudo cpan install Foo commands.
The Hack
The PAR project attempts to to create a solution to bundling the myriad files that usually compose a Perl application into a manageable monolith. PAR files are simply ZIP files with manifests. If you have PAR installed on ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.