Description: Until recently, Perl has experienced a deployment problem getting applications in front of novice end users on platforms where Perl is not bundled, like Microsoft Windows. Now, the invention of the PAR file format and software infrastructure has made it easy to ship software with a bundled Perl interpreter. This saves the user the barrier step of installing Perl and worrying about which version of Perl may be previously installed.

In this presentation, I will demonstrate using PAR to create standalone, installable applications. I will discuss a few of the gotchas with the current implementation and their solutions. Furthermore, I will demonstrate a technique for using SOAP to let the Perl application be a backend engine to a frontend GUI written in Flash to allow for a highly modular system with a customizable look.