In Chapter 2, we looked at standard Perl and its database connectivity module, Perl DBI. The command-line interface available in Perl and Perl DBI has served developers well for many years . But over time, people have become more accustomed to graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and there has been a movement towards GUI facilities for Perl. Oracle DBAs in particular appreciate applications that give them an easy-to-use graphical interface for managing their databases and a way to visually inspect difficult-to-interpret database data. In this chapter we'll look at Perl/Tk, an extensive GUI-based toolkit, as well as at a number of applications (many of them based on Perl/Tk) that provide Oracle DBAs with the graphical interfaces they find so useful. We'll cover:
In the next chapter, we'll move on to look at the Perl extensions and applications that use the Web, rather than custom-built GUIs, as their user interface. |