Philip Quaife 12 May 06
This project is a continuation of autoKit. It generates shrink wrapped executables from TCL source code on the fly. It is a collection of cgi scripts that can be used by any web server to serve applications.
Where autoKit only takes starkit files and generates executable files,AutoExe can take a variety of file formats and runtime systems.
Purpose
This project was created to help solve the problem of distributing TCL applications to end users.
It allows software developers to host a single archive file (zip, kit, tgz) and allow the generation of platform specific files for end users.
Overview
The developer creates an archive file of their code. Included in this file is a file containing information on the environment that was used in the development. This includes the names of extensions needed, and the type of interpreter used (eg tclkit freewrap).
This archive file is loaded to a web server. When a user requests the application, the cgi scripts take the archive file , add to it any extensions needed , append the archive to a runtime and then send the result to the user.
The archives can be generated in memory and streamed to the users, or they can built and cached to save processing time for busy archives.
Example
AutoExe is used by The Cool Store for serving TCL applications to end users.