Lone IDE for Perl?
By Brian Wilson
Perl Builder is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Perl. Solutionsoft claims it's the only one out there, and I have yet to find anything that disputes this claim. The Linux version 2.0 of Perl Builder Professional is available for download. It comes on a CD-ROM and includes both Windows and Linux versions.
Installation
I tried Perl Builder on my Red Hat 6.2 system. If you have a system based on a recent Red Hat (6.x) or Caldera (2.4) installation, setting it up should be a breeze. You need to have
glibc-2.1.2, a standard Perl installation, and X Window installed. The Perl Builder packages are in RPM format. I used my own build of the most recent Perl 5.6.0. Installing Perl Builder was a matter of downloading the tarfile from the Web site, unpacking it, and running the install1 and install2 scripts as instructed. That's all there is to it. The install2 script starts PerlBuilder automatically, so the IDE window appears when the installation is complete.
Remember that you'll have to add /home/pb2 to your PATH environment to restart it later. The online documentation includes a basic Perl Builder help and tutorial viewer, a Perl function reference, a Perl man page viewer, and a nice POD viewer. (PODs are documents embedded in Perl modules viewable from the command line via Perldoc.) All doc viewers can be invoked from the tool bar. Some of the docs use the MS Windows Help viewer, others are in HTML format and appear in a separate Netscape browser window. Although the included documentation is useful for reference, you'll still need to have a Perl book on hand.
