Programming in PERL –Tk and CGI Extensions

Course Number:  676-TP
Recommended Duration:  2 days

Intended Audience
Experienced PERL Developers who need to increase their PERL skills.

Objectives
The first part of this course teaches both the programming interface and the techniques that can be used to write procedures in Tk (ToolKit GUI) from the PERL scripting language.  The second part of this course teaches both the programming interface and the techniques that can be used to write CGI procedures in PERL that interface with Web Browsers, Web Servers, and applications written in HTML (text documents and forms).  Each student will also use PERL techniques and commands to write scripts to interface CGI scripts with HTML documents and forms.  There are several hands-on machine exercises.  All five UNIX platforms will be available for lab exercises.

Prerequisites
Completion of the "Programming in PERL: Basic/Intermediate" or equivalent experience is assumed.

Topics

PERL/Tk

• Overview of TCL/Tk

• Purpose of the language

• History of the development of TCL/Tk

• Extensibility of TCL

• The Tk Extension to TCL

• Tk component widgets: buttons, labels, menus, frames

• The pack function

• Launching Tk Applications: Building the Tk extensions within PERL, writing and executing Tk-PERL scripts

• Interfacing Tk Applications with PERL: Tk-extension widget templates, Using Tk-extension widgets within PERL, Buttons - push, radio, check, menu; Dialogs - dialog box, text, message; Scrolls - scrollbar, list box, file browser; Help - baloon and status messages; Undocumented and composite widgets

PERL/CGI

• Overview of Web communications

• Interactions between Browser and Server Simple

• Web page design in HTML

• CGI Introduction with PERL scripts

• Interactions between Server and PERL scripts

• Variables: user-defined, PERL built-ins, defined by the Web server

• Forms and Functions: HTML elements, Images, retrieving form input in CGI scripts, returning information for the Browser