Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links (Jun 7)
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From: Cameron Laird on 7 Jun 2010 18:54 QOTW: "[F]rom 'read the display and write the value down' to '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 <claird(a)phaseit.net> to subscribe. Be sure to mention "Tcl-URL!". -- Phaseit, Inc. 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