TkChat - A History

tkchat was first created as a Tk interface to Ralf chat which was the first incarnation of the Tcler's chatroom. The code was posted to this wiki by Bruce Hartweg and immediately suffered hacking by members of the Tcl community from which it has never recovered. The list of authors for this application now reads like a whos-who of the Tcl development community. Over time the chat has been moved from a web based chat to a Jabber Multi-User Chat and tkchat has dutifully followed, preserving most of the features from the earlier versions and acquiring some new ones. One of the advantages of the Jabber protocol is that it can be easily extended by clients and so tkchat was able to continue to support user-specified colour choices and the canvas-based whiteboard implementation. Some newer features that were added to support users during the 2007 Tcl conference now include an M-JPEG streaming video plugin and an audio streaming plugin that uses snack. Thus enabling our web attendees to partake in all the Tcl conference activity except the drinking (well, nearly).

For current information about tkchat see its wiki page.