Version 13 of Brian Passingham

Updated 2006-02-02 08:57:21

I've been using Tcl fairly quietly since 1998, but am now breaking cover, since I've been developing a product called Sharpen (http://www.passisoft.com/shqa.html ) to help reduce the costs of the "legacy" Vignette/StoryServer sites that use Tcl. There are still a lot of these out there.

I'm now pleased to announce the identity of the first Sharpen reference sites. The first is Egg plc, the world's largest pure online bank. Egg provides financial services products through its Internet site and other distribution channels.

Sharpen has been in use at Egg since the summer, and was recently used during the development of its new Egg Money product. Sharpen allowed several serious development and configuration management issues in the StoryServer codebase to be identified and fixed prior to entering the final test cycle, helping the project meet its aggressive timescale.

We have also secured a second reference site in the UK, the media giant British Sky Broadcasting Ltd. BSkyB allowed us to test Sharpen against their codebase at the beginning of the year, and will now be using Sharpen/QA on their legacy code until their port to V/7 is complete.

Version 1.1.3 of Sharpen/QA has just been released, offering improved error reporting facilities and ease of use.

A demo version of the software is now available. This is restricted to processing 50 templates at a time, and only reports the first few serious issues uncovered. (Sorry about the restrictions, but the first runs of software of this kind are the most valuable...) It should serve to illustrate the basic capabilities, though - I'll provide a small sample of deliberately bad code to make sure of this. If you are interested, please contact me at the e-mail address given below.

I gave a talk on Sharpen at the small but interesting Fifth European Tcl/Tk Users Meeting - the paper is online at http://www.t-ide.com/tcl2005e/6_sharpentcle2005.pdf.gz

mailto:[email protected]


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