Tcl community projects

Purpose: to provide announcements, information, and status regarding various projects relating to Tcl.


If you are using e-mail, web sites, physical proximity, groupware, MUDs, IRC, Instant Messaging, or some other technology to work together on some project, feel free to drop a pointer here.


  • The Tcler's Wiki is just one such project. This is an experiment in cooperative knowledge management, as well as the seedling of a project to develop the Wikit (underlying software). See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TclersWiki/ for a mailing list where interested users can discuss the future of the site and the underlying software.
  • Tcl 8.5 To-do List - there are various things that community members could contribute to improve Tcl 8.5 and future releases. In some cases, a knowledge of C is needed. However, in other cases, all it takes is someone reading the existing documentation, and then submitting patches to improve it.
  • Project E.L.M.O. at [L1 ] is one of Larry Virden's pet projects, discussing how the Tcl community can pool time and resources to keep URLs in FAQs, as well as other databases, up to date and how to feed new announcements into the various resource centers established around the world (including Wikits!). I hope to see software, database exchange formats, and volunteers evolve over the upcoming months.
  • Palmsupport-tcl at [L2 ] is another of Larry Virden's pet projects. It provides a place for Palm Pilot owners to discuss the development and use of Tcl related software on the desktop in a support mode.
  • SIMPL at [L3 ] provides some great interprocess communication hooks for Tcl/Tk. Tcl/Tk SIMPL apps can be written stand alone, as applets or as remote applications on a Windows OS.
  • The unmaintained free software project, at [L4 ], attempts to provide a catalog of software that is up for adoption.
  • Yahoo Club - http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/tclandrelatedextensions (Full of spam as of Oct 2008)
  • Scripting Patterns [L5 ] - Nat Pryce is collecting patterns related to the use of scripting languages.
  • Bruce Adams [L6 ] is working on an Introspection package.
  • A collaborative group are maintaining the TiK [L7 ] and non-core packages and plugins [L8 ] AOL Instant Messenger client. Originally written by an AOL insider to stress test their instant messenger servers, this has become a popular client, with many add ons and capabilities. The last version hubbed at AOL was v0.75. That version was promoted to v0.80 when the development effort hub was moved to SourceForge. This application is quickly becoming mainstream, and preferred by many to the AOL binaries and competing single-platform binary clients, because of its flexibility. [TiK] is used to communicate (chat groups and instant messages) with AOL subscribers using their built-in "Buddy" software, with those signed up at Netscape [L9 ](dead link), or at AOL [L10 ], using downloadable clientware, with those (predominantly on *N?X) using other client-ware, or with those using the TOC-Java web interface [L11 ](dead link).
  • David Gale is the author of OpenVerse Visual Chat - an OpenSource project. David wrote to me about his project: [The project goal is to] "create a Palace-like chat program which runs on all major OS platforms. Currently, it runs very well on Unix-like operating systems and windows operating systems. There are some issues with the Macintosh which we hope to work out soon. We are looking for development help and I think your page may be a good location for us to find some help. The URL for our project is http://openverse.com/ "
  • AOLserver [L12 ] AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server. AOLserver is the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server used for large scale, dynamic web sites.
  • OpenACS [L13 ] is an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. "If you're thinking of building an enterprise-level web application, OpenACS is a solid, proven foundation that will give you a 3-6 month headstart."
  • Project/Open [L14 ] is a Web-based project management application based on OpenACS. It contains project rooms and tools for managing clients, invoices, time, costs, etc.
  • David Beazley runs the Swig development project at http://www.swig.org/ . There is a mailing list, sub-teams supporting glue interfaces to languages like Java, MATLAB, etc. and more.
  • The Sphereal (pronounced like "cereal") Game Protocol [L15 ], and the game Sphereal itself by extension, is a Tcl tcp daemon like game protocol in development. I'm pretty sure this is the only game of its type, as we have plans to release the inner workings of the protocol so players can write their own clients. Come check us out at http://www.natcow.com/ . (This link appears to be dead. There is http://www.sphereal.com , but it seems that Spereal itself has been abandoned [L16 ]. rclayton, monmouth.edu)
  • Wobble [email protected] has worked, at times, on the cross-platform generation of extensions and applications.
  • Tcl-URL editorial staff is a group of volunteers coordinated by Cameron Laird and Jean-Claude Wippler
  • D. Richard Hipp, Joe English, and others have discussed the topic of converting the Tcl documentation into some XML format. See, for instance, http://www.hwaci.com/sw/tcldoc .
  • Self-Tcl is a german forum/portal for Tcl at: http://www.self-tcl.de
  • Sean Deely Woods runs the ODIE project (a set of exensions for the TCLHTTPD). Also on his website is the TclMatrix3d, a binary extension to provide high-speed 3D vector math in TCL.
  • Contribute to the Tcl information on wikicodia - Note (2017-03-08): Wikicodia seems to have disappeared as of, at least April 2012, according to http://wikiindex.org/Wikicodia

See also Tcl websites.