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From: Arjen Markus on 8 Jun 2010 04:42
On 8 jun, 00:54, Cameron Laird <claird...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.l...
>
> 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...(a)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
From: Harald Oehlmann on 8 Jun 2010 11:05
On 8 Jun., 00:54, Cameron Laird <claird...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>  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)

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