Wiki summary - 2 june 2019

With the new Wiki in place for quite some time now, the change of the seasons according to the meteorological calendar and various Tcl/Tk meetings just ahead or being prepared, it seems a good moment to revive an old tradition.

Golden oldies

There are a number of ways to (re)discover pages on the Wiki:

  • The "Recent changes" of course
  • The "Random page" choice in the "Tcler's Wiki" menu
  • And the diligent work of the various wikignomes!

As examples of the latter way:

  • GooWee is a window manager meant for the weedesk environment. All written in Tcl/Tk. Lovely screenshots :).
  • Interested in particular styles of programming? You may enjoy Functional Programming.
  • An eternal (infernal?) question that pops every now and then: how to deal with HTML text? Perhaps htmlparse and the solutions mentioned there can help.

The capabilities of Tk

Despite its age, or perhaps because of its age, you can do amazing things with Tk:

  • Piechart Disk may be the answer to finding out where all your disk space has gone to. Disks are big in this time and age, but they are still finite ...
  • Data visualisation is a vast topic, studded with techniques. Especially when it comes to interactivity, things are seldom simple. loon provides a wide variety of visualisation options. But if you want to visualise 3D data, why not have a look at ParaView or - in pure Tcl/Tk - 3dviewer : A canvas only viewer of 3D data
  • The possibilities have certainly not been exhausted. Just "ter leringhe ende vermaeck" (for education and fun): SphereDemo
  • And, in my opinion, an astonishing piece of engineering: the Geneva Drive explains how projecting movies worked in the good old days.

Think about it

Two features of the new Wiki that deserve attention: the tutorial menu and, if you want more in-depth stuff to read: the Articles menu item. But many pages on the Wiki give you other reading material as well:

  • CloudTk offers a nice way of using an Internet browser as the working environment for your Tcl/Tk applications.
  • If you need to work with JSON data, there are several packages out there that will help, yajl-tcl may not have the most pronounceable name, but that ssays nothing about its capabilities ;).
  • Programming paradigms and techniques differ widely - async, for instance, helps managing child processes, one way of dividing your calculations and conquer the problem. But within in a single process coroutines help to do something similar.

To conclude

This is merely a selection from the recently changed pages. There are many many more pages offering gems of graphics or programming solutions. So go and explore all the other ones!