Version 11 of Combining GUI applications developed with Tk and 'native' Windows toolkits

[Describe.]

Three senses:

Tk within frame of other application (written in, for example, Visual C++). So far, only works--barely--with IE.
Other application within frame of Tk
Tk application that also invokes, say, MFC widgets.

Jeffrey Hobbs and David Gravereaux know the most about these. None of them really work as of January 2002 without a lot of fiddling ...

Arjen Markus There may be a connection with Drawing Into Foreign Windows.

Frame and toplevel bear on this topic. If an external X11 application has a command-line option to configure its placement (as, for example, xanim's +Wid), then mumble-mumble used with the -container of toplevel and frame. "man winfo" gives information on X11-id-s. Credit Andreas Leitgeb with this observation.

placing the Tk widgets in IE has been simplified by using the TclControl activeX. Using the IE version 6.0, I have found it to be the most stable...

TclControl can be found at: http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~fuzz/optcl/default.html

I have made little to no changes to many Tcl/Tk apps that can run within the IE window... Yes you still need to have a copy of Tcl/Tk installed (but so does java requires a VM to be resident)...Of coarse you need to worry about security issues by allowing the activeX to access Tcl...

James Garrison <[email protected]>

[Explain tangential connections of TclScript and GPS work.]

The point of TclScript is to plug in the Tcl language as an IE extension. This would mean that IE would be able to parse pages with the following type of script code:

   <script language="TclScript">
      package require base64
      proc encode_text {str} {
          return [base64::encode $str]
      }
      proc show_dialog {message} {
          toplevel .dlg
          ....
      }
   </script>
   <form ....>

This isn't quite the same as the ActiveX component which has more to do with placing a Tk toplevel widget onto the browser window and processing Tcl script within itself.

Of course at present (Jan 2002) TclScript remains vapour-ware (or maybe liquid-ware as there is code, it's just not useable :) ) but I hope to find the time to continue at some point this year. PT

I wrote a C++ class that allows the use of any MFC based Windows control as a pseudo Tk widget. The class is based on a proprietary library so I cannot disclose the source code, but it was pretty straightforward, and makes only minimal use of Tk's internals.

Here's some code to get the CWnd* for a Tk widget: (Path is a char* with the widget path name):

        Tk_Window const tkmainwin = Tk_MainWindow(interp);
        if (tkmainwin==NULL)
                return NULL;

        Tk_Window const tkwin = Path==NULL
                ? tkmainwin
                : Tk_NameToWindow(interp,Path,tkmainwin);
        if (tkwin==NULL)
                return NULL;

        Tk_MakeWindowExist(tkwin);
        Window const window = Tk_WindowId(tkwin);
        if (window==NULL)
                return NULL;

        HWND const hwnd = Tk_GetHWND(window);
        if (hwnd==NULL)
                return NULL;

        CWnd *const Wnd = CWnd::FromHandle(hwnd);
        if (Wnd==NULL)
                return NULL;

        return Wnd;

Use this to find the parent window which you pass to CWnd::Create. After that, the MFC control will mostly take care of itself. In order to get geometry management right, I demand all of those MFC widgets to be the child of a standard Tk frame widget, and I use bind NameOfTheFrame <Configure> to trap moves and resizes of the frame in order to move resp. resize the MFC widget along with the frame. The whole wrapper is less than 300 lines of C++ (including comments). I successfully used it to embed a complex custom MFC widget (derived from CComboBox with a custom CEdit-derived edit control) in a Tk program.

Wolfram Rösler <[email protected]>