Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links (Jun 7)
Cameron Laird
'automatic
force recording' in less than 1hr, using Tcl + a serial port: ..." -
emiliano,
with <URL: http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/3733/inaction.jpg > as a
visual
aid
Thanks to Arjen Markus for this special report:
Tcl conferences are hard work for the attendants. Your Wiki
chronicler
has been to quite a few, so he knows from this from experience. This
week there was yet another opportunity of this type to meet Tclers
from
abroad - the ninth European meeting, again in Strasbourg.
Attending the meeting was - as usual - hard work. Not only because
the
organisers chose some fine restaurants to divert our attention from
Tcl,
or because the sunshine and the Alsacian wine conspired with them,
but
also because they did not quite succeed: instead we talked a lot
about
Tcl and Tk. And as it happened about the combination of Tcl and other
programming languages too. But let me be a bit more systematic about
the
presentations and the discussions. You will probably understand then
why
our attention was not easy to divert.
David Zolli, sometimes known as Kroc, is just as busy a man as he
used
to be, but he did find the time to present a utility he developed for
encrypting Tcl source code. The utility works on the Tcl source code
and
produces a starkit that can be unpacked but not to the original code.
This utility works for any version that supports starkits.
There were two presentations that focussed on wrapping software
libraries so that their functionality becomes available as Tcl
commands
- one by yours truly on various aspects of wrapping numerical Fortran
libraries, accompanied by a tool called Wrapfort that can generate
the required C code, and one by Paul Obermeier on the myriad of
libraries
involved in OpenGL and 3D rendering. As part of his effort to support
version 4.0 of OpenGL, he also developed a tool for inspecting what
interfaces are available on the given hardware.
Paul remarked that his life would be easier if SWIG, the tool he uses
to
generate the C code he needs, could generate TclOO classes from the C+
+
classes he is wrapping. (This might perhaps be the subject of a GSoC
project?)
Arnulf Wiedemann described his ongoing work with reporting tools
written
in Tcl and [incr Tcl]. You can define the reports in a flexible way,
thanks to a hierarchy of object classes. This is connected to his
efforts to re-implement [incr Tcl] using TclOO.
Vaclav Snajdr's content management system is somewhat related to
Arnulf's work, but it relies on another venerable programming
language:
COBOL. Vaclav found a way to interact with COBOL programs on Linux,
so
that he can use any such program - and mind you: there are many and
they
are still heavily used.
The last category of presentations revolved around Tk: Johann
Obendorfer
and Harald Oehlmann told about their efforts to bring Tile into
BWidget.
While at first it seemed necessary to create two separate versions of
BWidget, luckily they found a way to unite them, reducing the work on
the user's side to the addition of a single option to the "use"
command.
Csaba Nemethi presented similar work on Tablelist: he is using a
different package name instead to distinguish the classic Tk-based
widgets and the Tile widgets. Both packages, however, need to deal
with
Tile's widget styles and this proves to be a large effort. The
suggestion was to create a project on SourceForge where people can
contribute style definitions.
Not so much related to Tile, but to the good old canvas widget
I presented the ideas behind Plotchart and showed a few of its
possibilities. The discussion led to a bunch of suggestions for
improving and extending Plotchart - in fact, most if not all of the
presentations were the starting point for lively discussions and
an exchange of ideas.
As one of the maintainers, Jos DeCoster presented the newer features
the
Tclers' Wiki has gained - quite a few are related to formatting the
contents (but beware of feature creep!) - and the use of WubWikit as
a
local content management system. It is especially useful to generate
a set of static pages that can be installed on a system where you can
not easily install your own webserver.
So, despite the sunny weather, the fine food and the attractions
of a historic city like Strasbourg, we spent the time indoors,
focussed on our beloved programming language. Well, much of the time,
at least ...
Everything Tcl-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in
these
pages:
The "Welcome to comp.lang.tcl" message by Andreas Kupries
http://www.purl.org/net/tcl-welcome
comp.lang.tcl is a crucial resource for Tcl practitioners.
An interesting perspective on its traffic appears at
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/about
The Tcl Developer Site is Tcl's "home base".
http://www.tcl.tk
Larry Virden maintains a comp.lang.tcl FAQ launcher.
http://www.purl.org/NET/Tcl-FAQ/
Tcl Developer Xchange sponsor, ActiveState, keeps info to
convince your boss Tcl is a good thing
http://www.tcl.tk/scripting/
The Tcl'ers Wiki is a huge, dynamic, collaboratively edited
repository
of documentation, examples, tutorials and pontifications on all
things
Tcl.
http://wiki.tcl.tk/0
For the ideal overview of the topics about Tcl most likely to
interest a newcomer, see "Arts and Crafts ..."
http://wiki.tcl.tk/969
There's also a high-quality Wikibook on Tcl:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Tcl
ActiveState maintains binaries distribution and development tools
http://www.activestate.com/Tcl
along with a Cookbook of Tcl recipes
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/tcl/
"La Gazette du Técleux" is an important monthly publication.
http://wfr.tcl.tk/1159
deli.cio.us presents an intriguing approach to reference
commentary.
It already aggregates quite a bit of Tcl intelligence.
http://del.icio.us/tag/tcl
Cameron Laird tracks several Tcl/Tk references of interest (but
needs to validate many of the links).
http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.lang.tcl/
Years ago, Cetus Links maintained a Tcl/Tk page with verified links
http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_tcl_tk.html
"Yahoo! Groups" archives comp.lang.tcl.announce posts--even
though clta itself is dormant.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcl_announce/
We're working on more useful archives of past installments. Dave
Williams generously is building up
http://www.bacomatic.org/~dw/comp/tclurl/index.htm
and of course Google gives us
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Tcl-URL&as_ugroup=comp.lang.tcl
Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.
To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday, ask
<cla...@phaseit.net> to subscribe. Be sure to mention "Tcl-URL!".
--
Phaseit, Inc. (http://phaseit.net) is pleased to participate in and
sponsor the "Tcl-URL!" project.
Arjen Markus
>
> Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.
>
> To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday, ask
> <cla...@phaseit.net> to subscribe. Be sure to mention "Tcl-URL!".
> --
> Phaseit, Inc. (http://phaseit.net) is pleased to participate in and
> sponsor the "Tcl-URL!" project.
Thanks Cameron.
There are a few typos and an omission (*) in the text I sent you (Paul
Obermeier
and Johann Oberdorfer pointed them out). I will put the corrected
version
on the Wiki, but this will draw attention too.
Regards,
Arjen
(*) Csaba presented a very nice tree feature in Tablelist 5.0
Harald Oehlmann
> The last category of presentations revolved around Tk: Johann
> Obendorfer
> and Harald Oehlmann told about their efforts to bring Tile into
> BWidget.
> While at first it seemed necessary to create two separate versions of
> BWidget, luckily they found a way to unite them, reducing the work on
> the user's side to the addition of a single option to the "use"
> command.
Well, but it showed up in later discussions, that it is not senseful
to have the same package supporting "Tile" and "Traditional".
Thus we decided to fork the code into:
- BWidget 1.x -> Traditional widgets (source control tag "bwidget" in
tcllib/bwidget)
- BWidget 2.x -> Tile version (source repository tag "HEAD" in tcllib/
bwidget)