Twelfth Annual Tcl/Tk Conference
The 12th [nearly?] Annual Tcl/Tk conference (Tcl2005), sponsored by COMPANY: Noumena Corporation and COMPANY: Mentor Graphics, with help from ActiveState, and ExpoTech. Portland, OR, Oct 24-28, 2005.
Keynote Speaker
Our keynote speaker was Steve Collins, an attitude control system engineer at JPL (that means they let him steer spacecraft). Most recently, Steve was part of the Deep Impact team that blew a hole in the comet Tempel 1 (how many people do you know that have trashed a comet?)
Presented Papers
Tcl Core
Donal K. Fellows, Will Duquette, Steve Landers, Jeff Hobbs, Kevin Kenny and Miguel Sofer: Object Orientation for TclThis paper discusses plans to add XOTcl to the Tcl/Tk core for Tcl 8.5.
Jeff Hobbs: The (Active) State of Tcl
Jeff Hobbs, senior devloper and Tcl Technical lead at ActiveState, and core release manager will desdribe the latest developments in Tcl, Tk and major extensions.
Object Oriented Tcl
Joe Mistachkin: Tcl/Tk and the .NET FrameworkVarious methods of utilizing Tcl/Tk from the .NET CLR will be explored. Sub-topics will include encapsulation of Tcl runtime resources, object versus interpreter lifetime, threading models, interacting with COM and .NET objects, using Tcl stubs, and asynchronous event handling. TclBridge.NET will be used to demonstrate the concepts presented.
: Type-Definition Objects
The dominant Tcl object paradigm is "objects are ensemble commands". However, the call-by-name semantics associated with this paradigm are not always appropriate. Type-definition objects provide a simple way to combine complex object behavior with call-by-value semantics.
Science and Tech
D. Bazin: SpecTk: a displayer for NSCL SpecTclThe program SpecTk is a data displayer designed to work in tandem with the histogramming program SpecTcl written by R. Fox at the NSCL1 . Its purpose is to display and manipulate the various objects handled by SpecTcl in the process of inspecting and analyzing data from nuclear physics experiments.
(presentation slides)
Ron Fox and S. Lokitz: A Tcl/Tk Data Acquisition System for Nicotine Time Course Studies
This paper will describe the data acquisition system developed for a nicotine detector array developed for experiments at Duke University Medical Center. The system is based on a minimal Tcl extension that supports access to arbitrary VME bus addresses. Using this extension a pure Tcl/Tk data acquisition system has been written to acquire, record, and display in real-time the data from the detector array. Tcl/Tk technologies used include Tcl loadable extension modules, Tk and BLT based graphical user interfaces, and the ability of Tcl/Tk to serve as a vehicle for delivering rapid prototypical solutions.
World Wide Web
Jeff Hobbs: Tcl Plugin: Take 3The Tcl web browser plugin was developed in the late 90s to enable dynamic Tcl/Tk on the web. It languished following Microsoft's removal of Netscape plugin support and numerous browser updates. Jeff Hobbs will present a renewed Tcl plugin, compatible with all major browsers, cross-platform, up-to-date and easier to install than ever before.
Rocael Hernández and Andrew Grumet: OpenACS: robust web development framework
Openacs is a full featured web development framework to create scalable applications oriented to collaboration and online communities. Is in use by many big players such as greenpeace.org or the e-learning platform of the MIT Sloan School of Business. While the system is not trivial, here are explained some of the most interesting and still relatively simple facilities that the framework provides. Everything from templating, separating the code from the presentation, database interactions acording to the programming language, autodocumentation features, automated test engine, internationalization, and many more are written in TCL, which has shown to be an extremely powerful for writting the foundation logic and the application pages.
Software Testing
Neil Ostrove: TFUI in Tcl/Tk - Exploiting the Humble Dialog BoxThis paper reimplements the Movie List project from Dave Astels's book using [incr Tcl/Tk] and the tcltest framework.
Robert W. Techentin, Sharon K. Zahn, Barry K. Gilbert and Erik S. Daniel: Applying tcltest to Tk Applications
This paper presents an approach for automating Tcl/Tk application testing using the tcltest package. Some Graphical User Interface (GUI) test automation tools rely on screen coordinates and screen captures to drive the program under test, while others may drive at the widget level. This new approach tests the application at the procedural level, but supports starting and stopping the Tk windowing application multiple times in the same test file.
Arjen Markus, David Levelt and Adri Mourits: Regression testing of simulation programs
Regression testing of simulation programs using Tcl
Tcl Applications II
Gerald W. Lester: Design and Implementation Considerations for a Pure Tcl License ManagerThis paper will discuss design and implementation considerations for a pure Tcl License Manager that is platform neutral for the management of current use licenses. It will cover a minimum effort impementation that is layered on top of the TclHttpd to provide administrative control.
(presentation slides)
Jeffery P. Hansen: Creating Virtual Peripheral Devices in a Digital Circuit Simulator Using Tcl/Tk
TkGate is a digital circuit editor and simulator built as a hybrid C and Tcl/Tk application. It is used in circuit design courses at dozens of universities throughout the world and has interface support for nine European and Asian languages. In this paper we primarily focus on a feature of TkGate called VPDs (Virtual Peripheral Devices).
(presentation slides)
Steve Landers: Cryptkit – A Cryptographic Extension for Tcl
This paper describes the design and implementation of Cryptkit - a Tcl extension that provides a powerful toolkit that makes adding encryption and authentication services to Tcl applications straightforward - even for inexperienced crypto programmers. Cryptkit contains an abstracted binding to the Cryptlib security toolkit, plus a number of other features including an interface to Tcl channels, Tcllib cryptographic functions and an implementation of the recently endorsed X9.95 Trusted Time Stamp Management and Security standard.
Ron Fox: Slow Controls for Experiments in Nuclear Physics
The NSCL is a national nuclear physics research facility. Modern experiments in nuclear physics feature an increasing number and type of remotely controlled electronics including detector bias power supplies, discriminators, amplifiers and gas handling systems. These devices in turn connect to the computers controlling them via a wide variety of interfaces including Etherent, CAN, VME, and even the venerable CAMAC. This paper will describe an open, extensible control system for these sorts of devices that uses a pair of metakit databases to attempt to impose some sort of order on this chaos.
Performance
Phil Brooks: Pulling Out All the Stops - Implementation of a High Performance Tcl Extention in the Calibre IC Design Verification tool.The Calibre IC Design Verification LVS DEVICE tool's Tcl interface is examined. The architecture of this system provides maximum end user provided Tcl proc call performance from inside a C++ application.
(presentation slides) (example code)
Benjamin Vitale and Mathew Zaleski: Alternative dispatch techniques for the Tcl VM Interpreter
Like other virtual machines, the Tcl interpreter much dispatch virtual instructions. In this paper we outline two already-published techniques for efficient dispatch, and the results of experiments (one new, one already published) applying these ideas to Tcl.
Tcl Applications I
Thomas Burch and Ansgar Schmitz: Research Network and Database System – a Netbased Form of Working Platform in the CRS 600We present the design and implementation of a completely Tcl/Tk-based client/server application, which is intended to support a large community of reseachers whithin a so-called "Sonderforschungsbereich". The main purpose of this distributed system is to enable the participating users to cooperate via the internet in creating and annotating their data.
Thomas C. Allard: FanXE — The Fantastic XML Editor
FanXE is an XML editor written in [incr Tcl]/Tk using the tdom and Tkhtml. A developer builds XSLT style sheets that transform nodes in the DOM into HTML forms editable in the GUI. When the form is submitted, the DOM node is rebuilt.
(presentation slides) J.Lima, J.Rocha: Pure Tcl/Tk Train Traffic Supervision System
This paper describes an experimental subway train traffic supervision software written using pure Tcl/Tk. Train traffic supervision software interact with traffic control PLCs (Programmable Logic Controller) to retrieve information from the railroad and interact at the exploration level, like granting or deferring a train departure.
(alternate formatting)
Graphical User Interfaces
J.Lima: CanvasPlus: an improved modular canvas implementation for TkThis paper describes an alternate implementation to the Tk Canvas. It comprises: a core which provides a basic drawing interface and bindings to events; and a set of application specific modules which implement the higher level commands, these can range from the ones found in the standard canvas implementation, to more structured commands which are necessary to implement complex 2D cad applications. (alternate formatting)
Brian Griffin: A 2-D paned window for a user configurable U/I
This paper will present the basic functions of a window pane management widget and the added features that make this a powerful tool for application frame development, such as Pane Docking, Pane Zoom. Implementation details, problems encountered, and future development will also be discussed.
(presentation slides)
Original abstracts are available at Tcl-2005 - https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2005/abstracts.html
Original Official conference info page: https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2005
For more details see the conference info page at https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2005
Program Committee
Donal Fellows University of Manchester Clif Flynt Noumena Corp. Ron Fox NSCL Michigan State University Jeff Hobbs ActiveState Corp. Steve Landers Digital Smarties Gerald Lester HMS Software Cyndy Lilagan Eolas Technologies Inc. Arjen Markus WL | Delft Hydraulics
Discussion
Comments on Tutorials
DKF: This year, I went to Richard Hipp's two tutorials on sqlite. They were excellent, and I have to say that sqlite is an interesting piece of software where I recognize many of the design tradeoffs from working with the core. I found it particularly interesting that the way you use sqlite in Tcl is much more natural than the way you do so in most of the other language bindings (e.g. PHP), and that this is deliberate policy on the part of the authors of those bindings. "Fools!" I think. "They've not understood the importance of good and natural interfaces."
MR If anyone cares, I've posted one note about the conference at my blog, with probably some others coming later...anyone else sharing their thoughts? http://www.markroseman.com/blog/ ... time passes... Added a second entry.. permalinks to both posts are [L1 ] and [L2 ]. Anyone else have any post-trip reports?
escargo 3 Nov 2005 - Now that the conference is over, will there be a proceedings published, or complete papers/presentations made available?
SPB 4 Mar 2006 - To follow up with escargo's question. Can these proceedings be found anywhere? I've looked about everywhere I could think of, with no success in finding them. T'would be a pity for this contribution to be lost to the community.
RLH 31-Jul-2006 - Are the presentations going to be published?
RLH 06-Sept-2006 - I am persistent. : )
MBS 21-Feb-2007 - I'm also curious if the papers or presentations are available.
TR - Live audio streams from the conference have been made available at [L3 ] as mp3 and ogg files. Listen to nearly all talks given in 2005!
Thanks to rmax for his work on this audio stream and stever for providing the hardware to send the stream out of the hotel.
Some pictures from the conference are posted at http://tclers.tk/tcl2005