FINAL CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: TCL/TK '93
Larry Rowe
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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Tcl/Tk Workshop
June 10-11, 1993
University of California at Berkeley
The first Tcl/Tk Workshop will be held this summer at U.C. Berkeley to
exchange information about Tcl and Tk and to foster the future development
of Tcl and Tk and their applications. The workshop will include two
types of sessions: current work and future directions. In the sessions
on current work, participants will present interesting projects currently
underway with Tcl and Tk. Future direction sessions will provide an
opportunity to discuss open issues and possible solutions. Some possible
topics for these sessions include:
1. Bindings. Right now the Tk binding mechanism does not compose very
well (e.g., you cannot define a binding for a specific widget without
potentially overriding the default behavior defined with class
bindings). The binding mechanism needs to be modified to support
more graceful extension and composition, but how?
2. Security. Currently there is no support to protect your application
or environment from malicious attacks by remote processes using the
send command or IPC extensions (e.g., tclTCP, tclDP, etc.). Some mechanism
may be required to protect your application, but still support flexible
inter-application communication.
3. Modules, objects, and multiple interpreters. It is hard to scale up
Tcl-based systems because of conflicts for procedure names and global
variables. A module scheme might ease these problems. In addition,
many people have suggested that Tcl should be more object-oriented,
but no-one has come up with a simple and powerful scheme for this yet.
Finally, sharing of variable scopes among related interpreters (and
possibly inheritance of variables, procedures, etc. among them) would
be useful in larger, more complex systems. How could such features be
added without making the language too complex for simple uses?
4. Multi-threading/process control. Several groups are developing
Tcl programs that manipulate subprocesses and/or have multiple threads
of execution. These situations tend to arise in multimedia applications
where you need one thread handling the display and other threads handling
real-time streams of data (voice, video) or events. Is the "send" model
general enough?
5. Object management and embedding. The "send" command provides a first
step in making applications work together, but its naming mechanism is
limited and it doesn't currently support activation and embedding. How
might these facilities be added?
6. Tcl/Tk is a rapidly growing community, however, there are other things
that might be done to make it even larger. For example, the system needs
to be modified to provide internationalization support and Tk should be
ported to Windows and the Mac Toolbox. How can these admittedly
commercial developments be funded and managed?
Workshop attendance will be limited to encourage interaction and discussion.
In order to attend, you must submit one of the following: (a) a 1-3 page
description of a presentation you could make in a session on current work;
(b) a 1-3 page description of a discussion you could lead in a session on
future directions; or (c) a 0.5-1 page description of your current work
with Tcl and/or Tk (if you don't wish to make a presentation). Be sure
to emphasize the novel aspects of your work or the parts that would be
most useful to the Tcl/Tk community. If you have expertise in related
fields such as internationalization, object management (e.g. OLE or CORBA),
or multi-media, be sure to say so in your submission. A program committee
will select attendees and organize sessions based on the submissions.
The program committee is composed of the following people:
Lawrence Rowe, U.C. Berkeley (Program Chair, la...@cs.berkeley.edu)
Sven Delmas, Technical University of Berlin
Mark Diekhans, Santa Cruz Operation
Karl Lehenbauer, Neosoft Corporation
John Ousterhout, U.C. Berkeley
Andrew Payne, Digital Equipment Corporation
Brent Welch, Xerox PARC
Submissions must be made electronically by mailing to tc...@cs.berkeley.edu
by Friday April 9, 1993. People selected to attend the workshop will be
notified by May 1.
Registration for the workshop will cost $120 which will cover the
cost of coffee and snacks, lunches, the banquet, and a copy of the
workshop proceedings.