By Curtis Jewell

You may have heard about a new and larger Perl distribution for
Windows called “Strawberry Perl Professional”. The idea behind it
was known as “Chocolate Perl”. You may have heard that name, too.
What does that mean for Strawberry Perl for Windows, and for Perl
in general?

Don’t worry, Strawberry Perl
will still be maintained. In fact, Strawberry Perl Professional
would not be possible without Strawberry Perl as it has been for
the past few years, and is directly installable on top of Strawberry
Perl. The ideas behind Strawberry Perl and Strawberry Perl Professional
overlap, but are subtly different.

Strawberry Perl is made for the “intermediate-to-expert” Perl
programmer (although even newbies can use it), who is likely to be
coming over from Unix and is needing to write Perl scripts and
modules in the Windows environment. The goal is to be as close to
the Perl experience on Unix as possible, and with a minimum of
problems, while still staying native to Windows.

The goals of the modules that Strawberry Perl includes,
therefore, are:

1. To be able to install other Perl modules easier, whether from
   CPAN, from .par files, or .ppm files.
2. To include hard-to-install modules (the databases, and the
   cryptographic toolchain).

Strawberry Perl Professional is made for the Perl programmer of
any (or even no) experience writing Perl in or for the Windows
environment, and includes in addition:

1. Modules that significant segments of the Perl community use on
   a regular basis (BioPerl, Catalyst.)
2. Modules that help improve the quality and readability of the
   Perl code being written, and make releasing Perl programs and
   modules easier.
3. Graphical programs to assist in maintenance and debugging of
   Perl code, viewing Perl documentation, and installing Perl
   modules.

To this end, Strawberry Perl Professional includes Padre as an IDE,
and also includes a graphical CPANPLUS shell and Plain Old Documentation
viewer. It also includes most of the modules in Task::Kensho, and
more links to websites for the Perl community, especially relating
to the installed modules, and introductions to programming Perl.

If you want to test out the first alpha version of Strawberry
Perl Professional, read the announcement (so
you know what you’re getting into) and then go to the Strawberry Perl beta page and
download and install it. Suggestions for improvements, and bug
fixes to the component modules, are certainly welcome – I’ve
already been given quite a few.

Curtis Jewell has
been helping build and write Strawberry Perl for Windows for the
past year, and also reports bugs and sends patches to other Perl
projects.

Jan Dubois posted about Microsoft’s 3rd Annual Scripting Games, where you can win prizes for writing Perl programs to solve programming problems like “find a word that you can make out of a phone number,” and “count the number of characters in a given text file.”

I’d enter if there were interesting prizes, but all the prizes for Windows-only software packages. 🙁

Adam Kennedy is thinking about the future of Strawberry Perl.

In line with my attitude that the main Strawberry “product” should be conservative, reliable and predictable (I’m going with a rough analogy to Firefox product-wise) I’ve been thinking a little about how the release tempo should look.
My current thinking for Strawberry Perl is to do quarterly releases, with a tentative schedule of releases in January/April/July/October and aiming at being available for download before the second Monday of the month.

In addition, he’s asking for your ideas on features to include in the April 2008 release.

Yesterday’s article about Strawberry Perl referred to a blog post with incorrect installation instructions. All the downloading and installing discussed is just not necessary, even for CPAN installations. According to Adam Kennedy:

The install and setup process for Strawberry Perl is to uninstall any existing Perl, run the installer, and then run “cpan” or run it from the Start menu. There is no additional installation required.

Note: Beware of the instructions in the link below. It has you do far more work than is necessary. See this follow-up article for details.

Here’s the first big blog post I’ve seen about Strawberry Perl: How to install and set up Strawberry Perl

I am writing this article with much joy and glee…. Active State no longer has a monopoly on the issue of Perl on the Windows platform

I haven’t read the Strawberry Perl docs, since I’m Windows-free. The blog post gives details about what tools are necessary to make the install, with links to the tools.
Now, I thought that part of Strawberry Perl was that you wouldn’t need any external tools, but maybe they’re just for building CPAN modules.

Adam Kennedy has released his Strawberry Perl for Perl 5.10.0. Strawberry Perl is the Windows Perl distribution that’s an alternative to ActiveState‘s distribution, and it includes tools for building CPAN modules natively, so you’re not tied to ActiveState’s PPM repository, which may not include the module you want to install, or may be behind a few versions.