1. Why Prima?

Anno 2023, an explanation of Pros and Cons of GUI and CLI tools is not necessary. Much is written about this. At the end you've to say that both tools have their place. In this chapter, I'll have a look at Prima (1), a GUI tool that has many advantages.

  • Multi-platform GUI development, Linux, Windows (2), and UNIX/X11 workstations (FreeBSD, IRIX, SunOS, Solaris and others).
  • Tutorial and documentation are online: https://metacpan.org/dist/Prima
  • The 508 page documentation is also as PDF available: http://www.prima.eu.org/download/Prima.pdf
  • Prima has a modern, flat UI design (https://github.com/dk/Prima)
  • The package includes useful examples.
  • The RAD-style Visual Builder (VB), a component of the Prima Package, is used for creating and testing Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) in a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) manner (3).
  • Prima is well maintained.
Thanks to Dmitry Karasik for Prima and for still maintaining Prima very well!

Install:
cpanm Prima
or
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Prima

1.1 Why this chapter?

While working with Prima, I had often questions that were sometimes rather difficult to answer. Of course, all answers can be found in the documentation. But let's present the basics of Prima in an uncomplicated way, completely understandable for a newbie (like me). I'll try to give you tools preparing you for your own Perl-Prima journey.

Footnotes
(1) There are more tools: Tk is rather popular. You can easily find documentation, books and tutorials (also on youTube).
(2) Prima is the only package for a modern Gui under Strawberry-Perl and Windows.
(3) You can save your GUI design from the Visual Builder into a separate Form File which can be loaded across different parts of the application or even different applications, saving time on GUI design.