Purpose: collect information about the starkit called Kitten.
Someone (dgp?) recently on the wiki chatroom observed that the idea of kitten is to turn a tclkit/starkit 2 file deployment into a 3 file deployment (unless of course you merge your application with either the kitten or tclkit starkit).
What: kitten
Where: http://www.equi4.com/wikis/equi4/201
Description: Kitten is a tclkit collection of Tcl/Tk extensions aimed at reducing the work a developer has to do while developing a starkit. It contains script and compiled extensions like tcllib, BWidget, expat, Expect, incr Widgets, mclistbox, mpexpr, narray, a tcl parser, an sgml parser, tclSOAP, stooop, Supertext, tdom, Tix, Tktable, tclXML, tkHtml, ClassyTk and others. Binary extensions are compiled for Windows, Linux, and Solaris as possible.
Updated: 02/2003
Contact: See web site.
To use kitten, download it from above (it's about 4 Mb). If all you want to do is use the included packages from your application running under tclkit (over 130 by now), then nothing could be simpler:
source kitten.kit
By executing the command "tclkit kitten.kit", you get a GUI-based embedded help system (based on Wikit).
By running "tclkit kitten.kit -l", you get a list of packages present in kitten, as well as their version number(s). On Windows, use "tclkitsh.exe kitten.kit -l", since this is command-line based.
(Older output of "kitten -l" removed, the Kitten home page [L1 ] has a better listing now, 142 packages on Linux at last count)
Jan 2003 - The "-u" update flag is no longer functional. It is being replaced by a far more generic and efficient mechanism. Work is in progress, no ETA yet. -jcw
Feb 2004 - actually, there has been a replacement mechanism for many months now: "sdx update kitten.kit" will update only modified files. FWIW, I've updated tcllib in it to the just-released 1.6. -jcw
Unsolicited response: this is stunning.
Steve Landers characterizes Kitten as "nothing more than an experiment ... this is how you might build a BI--if you wanted to." Even so, it's within 10% of 'producthood'.
Kitten is constructed as a regular starkit, with one change to make its use convenient for sourceing, in main.tcl, the line "starkit::startup" has been replaced by:
if {[starkit::startup] == "sourced"} return
With this, "source kitten" simply sets things up and then makes all its packages available in the caller.
See Considerations when adding extensions to Kitten for discussions on cross-platform deployement in this wonderful package.
See also sdx, the Starkit Developer eXtension used to create starkits.
lexfiend 2007-12-30: Looks like there haven't been updates to Kitten in a while, and it's no longer in the new Equi4 wiki (I've changed all links above to point to their old wiki. Has it been abandoned?