TCLA
Tcl Community Association
Current Activities: US Conference: Nov 12-16 2012 -- Google Summer of Code
TCLA

Birds of a feather flock together

Tcl/Tk Conference: 2010

The 2010 Tcl Conference was held in Oakbrook Terrace, IL.

Our invited guest was Georgios Petasis , a Natural Language researcher and Tcl advocate from Greece. Initially, Georgios wasn't sure he would have anything to say that would interest us. It turned out that he has a lot to say, and all of it is interesting.

Georgios's main interests are Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Tcl/Tk. He developed the Tk DragNDrop package, Tcl Agents, the Tk Toolbar and more. He recently completed migrating a major application from IncrTcl on Tcl8.5 to TclOO on Tcl8.6 and spoke at length on the ease and hazards of such a migration.

The Tcl Community Association awarded two more Community Service Awards to Gustaf Neumann and Donal Fellows for their work on extending Tcl's support for Object Oriented programming with XOTcl and the new TclOO.

The final highlights to the conference were a couple of post-conference events. The folks who stayed Friday night enjoyed a tour of Fermilab Laboratories and a dinner and theater excursion to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers at the Drury Theater.

Welcome and Keynote


Georgios Petasis
ITcl 4 && TclOO migration
Slides from Keynote Address:
  • The shock of Tcl 8.6
  • Porting existing code to TclOO
  • Case study: the Ellogon NLP platform
  • iTcl facilities in TclOO
  • Organisation of classes in Ellogon
  • Creating an Annotation Tool
  • Concatenating Dialogs
  • Conclusions

Being Webbed


Steve Landers
Tk on the iPhone/iPad via WubTk
WubTk is a new implementation of Tk that is layered on jQuery in a browser. It allows development of web applications in Tcl using a familiar Tk-like API.

This paper describes the conversion of an existing biomedical visualization program to WubTk, enabling it to be deployed in a browser. It also describes a custom iOS App that provides a more native look and feel on devices like the iPad and iPhone.

The paper also positions WubTk with respect to Tk (including enhancements beyond the Tk API) and discusses planned new features.


Arnulf Wiedemann
ATWF Web Framework
 ATWF a Tcl web framework is a work in progress, which started about 3 years ago with a brain storming wiki page ToW Tcl on WebFreeWay. The ideas collected at that page with a lot of feedback from the community were the base for further investigation. Inspired from a payed work project using PHP's Zend framework I decided to convert as a starting point the basic parts of that framework nearly 1:1 into Tcl. The very first pre alpha version is now handling the first requests. It has some adaptions to Tcl constructs, but the rest is nearly identical to the original version.

Core Internals


Donal Fellows
Adventures in TclOO
I have been working on a number of small projects that use TclOO in fairly complex ways, and this paper will cover some of them. In particular, it will look at its use for building more advanced APIs in the areas of interfacing to the HTTP protocol for use with REST services, for mapping relational databases into Tcl, and for supporting metadata on TclOO objects themselves.

Ozgur Ugurlu and Kevin Kenny
A Bytecode Assembler for Tcl
Tcl Assembly Language: what it is
  • A way for scripts to include instructions at the
  • Tcl virtual machine level
  • A bookkeeping system for code generation
  • A way for compilers (for instance little languages) to target the Tcl bytecode engine
  • A rapid prototyping system for Tcl code generation
  • A new backend connection for L?

Wojciech Kocjan
CookFS, a new VFS driver for standalone binaries
Cookfs is an open source VFS for Tcl written in C and Tcl. It is designed to achieve better compression ratio compared to Mk4 VFS and ZIP archives. It also offers configurable compression algorithm currently zlib and bz2, with plans for lzma in the future. It's also designed to be used in Tclkit-like applications. Cookit project shows how cookfs can be used for this purpose.

WIPs (Work-In-Progress)


Georgios Petasis
TkRibbon
Work In Progress Slides. TkRibbon is a Windows-like Ribbon for Tcl/Tk.

Andreas Kupries
diagram
A diagramming toolbox

Tcl (and the) Community


Andreas Kupries
Tcl's GSoC 2010 Participation Summary
Google's Summer Of Code (short: GSoC) is a global program funded and operated by Google that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. The Tcl Community participated again this year, for the third time in a row. As in previous years this participation was managed by the Tcl Community As- sociation (short: TCA) as the mentoring organization, the same organization which runs the US Tcl Conferences. The main entrypoint to the program for the community itself can be found on the Tcler's Wiki.

Meta Programming


Peter MacDonald
Accelerating Tk Development with Wize 3.0
Wize attempts to reduce complexity by offering a development environment that lets programmers do more, with less, by providing:
  • Code and data validation.
  • Abstract GUI creation (layouts, scrollbars, tooltips, bindings, etc).
  • Powerful widgets (TreeView, Tabset and shaped widgets).
  • Hierarchical Tcl data (Tree).
  • A common base of support components.

Sean Woods
Using Tcl code to build C code (to build Tcl code...)
This paper describes the C and Tcl Hashtable Underpinnings for Language High-level Understanding, or CTHULHU. CTHULHU is a series of tools to build C extensions for Tcl, from Tcl. It's focus is on computing problems that require Tcl to have access to complex data structures that are themselves manipulated by existing C code. These tools were originally developed to support the Test and Evaluation Solution's Integrated Recovery Model, but would be applicable to any problem in which Tcl needs to interact with C data structures in real- time.

Andrew Mangogna
Supporting Embedded Software Development Doing the Heavy Lifting with Tcl/Tk
Software development on micro-controller based computing platforms is very challenging due to minimal computing resources and I/O capabilities. These micro-controller platforms are deployed widely in areas such as home automation, consumer electronics, automotive and medical devices. This paper discusses a set of software tools, implemented in Tcl / Tk, that support software code generation for small embedded micro-controller based systems. The core tool is a program called, pycca, which is a domain specific language for specifying data structures, data relationships and Finite state machine behavior. The focus of the paper is not on the functionality of pycca but rather the underlying Tcl technology used to implement the tools. Although it is not possible to run a Tcl interpreter on small micro-controller based systems, Tcl is a valuable tool used to support the de- velopment and testing of this class of system. All the programs discussed are available as part of an open source project.

Tk I


Prashant Thakre and Tushar Gupta
Migrating an Tcl/Tk application to 8.5 - A Case Study
This paper describes the challenges involved in porting a large scale enterprise application from Tcl/Tk 8.4 to Tcl/Tk 8.5, and lists down all issues encountered during the migration. The migration to Tcl/Tk 8.5 required adjustments in application code, necessitated due to changes in interface, or as a result of unexpected functional behaviour. On some occasions it was required to patch the Tcl/Tk 8.5 distribution with fixes which are now expected to be included into standard Tcl/Tk release.

Steve Landers and David Roseman
Augmented Reality, Google Earth and Tcl/Tk
This paper will describe the implementation of an augmented reality simulation of a proposed wind farm, combining Google Earth (either standalone or via a browser plugin) with animated turbine models to give realistic impressions of the visual impact of a proposed offshore wind farm in Lake Michigan.

Several aspects of the simulation will be discussed, including the use of a Tcl/Tk application for the generation and layout of KML (geographic data) files, the use of Tcl CGI programs for generating dynamically sized images and data, and a Tcl/Tk program to control Google Earth.

Mention will also be made of some of the non-programming issues encountered, including visual perception issues such as Field of View and the Moon Illusion.


Georgios Petasis
TkDND
This paper is about TkDND, a Tcl/Tk extension that aims to add cross-application drag and drop support to Tk, for popular operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X and GNU/Linux. Being in its second rewrite, TkDND 2.x has a stable implementation for Windows and OS X, while support for Linux and the XDND protocol is still under development.

Mixed Bag


Georgios Petasis
Ellogon & Threads
This paper is about the Ellogon language engineering platform, and the challenges faced in modernising it, in order to better exploit contemporary hardware. Ellogon is an open-source infrastructure, specialised in natural language processing. Following a data model that closely resembles TIPSTER, Ellogon can be used either as an autonomous application, offering a graphical user interface, or it can be embedded in a C/C++ application as a library. Ellogon has been implemented in C/C++ and Tcl/Tk: in fact Ellogon is a vanilla Tcl interpreter, with the Ellogon core loaded as a Tcl extension, and a set of Tcl/Tk scripts that implement the GUI. The core component of Ellogon, being a Tcl extension, heavily relies on Tcl objects to implement its data model, a decision made more than a decade ago, which poses difficulties into making Ellogon a multi-threaded application.

Clif Flynt
TclMilter
Handling email has become a greater and greater burden on the aver- age computer user. The user must be able to read mail safely, including examining the non-obvious fake mail. There is a need to sort valid from invalid, urgent and non-critical, or just sorting into mail from mailing lists, friends, relatives, etc.

This problem is worse for the systems administrator who also has to deal with the quantities of mail clogging the networks, filling the disks and filling the administrator mailbox with failure notices.

There are many tools to mitigate these problems, ranging from using a webmail service like Gmail, letting Microsoft solve your problems by using Outlook, or using *ix tools like procmail, etc.

All of these tools are written in compiled languages. The speed is good, but the ability to reconfigure and adapt is low.

Tools written in Tcl are as fast as the average user, and are more easily adapted to the ever-changing email environment.


Andreas Kupries
CRIMP
This paper provides an overview of a new image manipu- lation and processing package for Tcl, the C Raster Image Manipulation Package, or CRIMP for short. We will have a quick look into its history, internal organization and im- plementation, plus current and possible future features and directions to work in.

Tk II


Gaurav Bansal and Roshni Lalwani
Enhanced Tcl/Tk Widgets for EDA applications
Considering the huge designs required to be navigated and analyzed in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) applications, there is need to enhance the underlying Tcl/Tk widgets to optimize both the performance and memory consumption. This paper talks about enhancing the MtiHierarchy widget (part of the Mtiwidget package) and Text widgets in a way that eliminates the performance overheads due to the magnanimity of the data in the EDA applications and also providing various useful features.

Will Duquette
The State Controller Pattern
A GUI application must enable and disable widgets as the state of the application changes. Bryan Oakley's notion of "actions" aids this by associating widgets with user actions; widgets associated with an action can be enabled and disabled as a group. This paper suggests a different pattern in which widgets are associated instead with the conditions for which they are enabled, thus greatly simplifying the problem of triggering widget state changes as the application state changes.

Georgios Petasis
TileQT & TileGTK
This paper is about two Tile and Ttk themes, TileQt and TileGTK. Despite being two distinct and very different extensions, the motivation for their development was common: making Tk applications look as native as possible under the Linux operating system.

Tk III


Madhur Bhatia, Saurabh Khaitan, and Tushar Gupta
Tcl/Tk guidelines for improved automated regressions - a case-study
Automating regression flow for any GUI application always poses a lot of challenges. The automation demands recording and replaying the user interactions with the GUI often with timing synchronization between operations. There are some commercial and open-source solutions available which provide interactive test capabilities which can capture user sequences. Such testing applications access the internal objects of the application through the hooks provided via GUI toolkit. For automating the GUI based tests for our emulation product Veloce, an enterprise application based on Tcl/TK, various testing solutions were evaluated. Automation of GUI testing was supplemented by other methods like tcl script regressions, custom test applications and specific logging wherever required. The paper presents a case-study of various issues encountered in developing good automated regression flow for emulation GUI, and presents some coding and development guidelines for Tcl/Tk applications in general for suitability for development of automated regressions.

Georgios Petasis
TkGecko
The support for displaying HTML and especially complex Web sites has always been problematic in Tk. Several efforts have been made in order to alleviate this problem, and this paper presents another (and still incomplete) one. This paper presents TkGecko, a Tcl/Tk extension written in C++, which allows Gecko (the HTML processing and rendering engine developed by the Mozilla Foundation) to be embedded as a widget in Tk. The current status of the TkGecko extension is alpha quality, while the code is publically available under the BSD license.

Joe Mistachkin
Eagle: Maturation and Evolution
Eagle (Extensible Adaptable Generalized Logic Engine) is an implementation of the Tcl scripting language for the Common Language Runtime (CLR) .

The initial scope of the project was modest compared to 'real' Tcl; however, it was ambitious considering the sixty day schedule for design, implementation, and testing. Three years have passed since then.

This paper explains how Eagle has matured and evolved since it was presented at the 15th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference .