Greetings and salutations fellow Tcl hackers. I thought I would christen
the mailing list by introducing myself and inviting discussion on a
number of topics.
In case you don't know already, my name is Stewart Allen and I am the
author of Visual Tcl. By day I am the Systems Manager for a software
company, Harlequin, Inc., located in Cambridge, MA. When my day job strays
too far from my hobbies, I find myself hacking together interesting bits
of code in the evening. More often than not, this has something to do with
Linux. And that's how Visual Tcl started.
Not to get too long-winded on the subject, but... I started Visual Tcl
back in 1995 as a rapid GUI prototyper for IS projects with an eye on
building better systems interfaces for Linux. It sat dormant for almost
half a year until June of this year when I had a chunk of time to invest.
Since then I have bootstrapped it to the point where close to 50% of the
code was generated by itself.
Not satisfied with a simple GUI builder, I now have my sights set on a
complete IDE. I want it to be readily available to the public at large
since I believe that good tools in the hands of users stimulates
creativity. Linux is a perfect example of what this can spark in people.
It is also time for a good truly cross-platform tool. In a client-server
environment, thin clients rule and tcl is the perfect thin client. The
combination of these two is a potent mixture. With a complete IDE, it
becomes a compelling reason not to invest in the (come on, let's face it)
closed/proprietary Microsoft environment.
Anyway, that's enough of my philosphy/religion for now. On to the meat of
the subject at hand: Visual Tcl.
I don't want to place any boundaries on the possibilities of where Visual
Tcl could go. I'm in the process of adding Tix widget support (though VT
will not use these widgets), extending the capabilities of compound
widgets and evaluating other "technologies" like [incr tcl] and the tcl
plug-in for Netscape. There is also the possibility of "exporting" tk
GUI's to python, perl and limbo (inferno).
Mostly I want it to remain portable, powerful and easy to use. It will
continue to follow the development of Tcl/Tk. I hope I have written it in
such a way that will allow flexible integration of new widgets and
geometry managers. The code is still early on an evolutionary scale so
there are great changes from release to release as I optimize it towards
this goal.
One issue that has cropped up several times is the name. "Visual Tcl"
places it in a fairly crowded name space which leaves much room for
confusion. I am shopping for other possibilities at this time.
As always, I look forward to your comments, criticism and suggestions!
-stewart-
