Version 94 of Tcl Articles

Updated 2009-10-02 20:03:53 by rwm

This index points to just some of the online articles about Tcl, Tk, and various extensions. Most of these articles really talk about Tcl, instead of just mentioning it along with other scripting languages.

LV I've taken a first whack at organizing this page by article year where possible. If you would like to move some items from the unorganized section to the appropriate year, please feel free to do so. Also feel free to add new articles...

2009


02 Oct 2009 - embedded.com: Using Tcl to create a virtual component in Verilog [L1 ]

02 Oct 2009 - embedded.com: A brief introduction to the TCL Scripting Language [L2 ]

2008


17 Dec 2008 LWN.net: Hv3 and the art of minimalist web-browsing [L3 ]

04 Feb 2008 SD Times: Tcl Turns 20 [L4 ]


2007

02 Nov 2007 Computerweekly.com: "Hot skills: become a speedy software developer with Tcl" [L5 ]


15 Oct 2007 - Linux.com on trowser, a new text file browser to replace less.[L6 ]


23 Jan 2007 Infoworld has a brief news item on Æjaks, mixed in with another large company's Ajax dev kit. http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/23/HNmicroajax_1.html

2006


10 Jun 2006 Tcl your desktop - Bill Zimmerly shows the world how to enhance one's desktop with tiny yet surprisingly useful applets.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-tcldsktop.html?ca=dgr-lnxw07TCL (discussion thread at http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=14849 )


Bryan Oakley March, 2006, I've started a site at http://www.tclscripting.com that already has a handful of tcl- and tk-specific articles. My goal is to do one article a week, then organize those by month, though I haven't quite attained that yet. It's not quite a magazine, but it's a start.

2005


May, 2005 "Make it right using Tcl" - Software testing with Tcl for Apache Rivet by David Welton :

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_04/software_testing_with_tcl/


See http://librenix.com/ for a Jan 31, 2005 article about scripting a binary tree using Tcl. It appears the article also appears at http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=8250 .

2004


SS 8Oct2004: An Interview about hping3 covering some Tcl aspect can be found at [L7 ].

Great Article, thanks a lot.


Feburary 2004 Brett Schwarz writes about Asterisk [L8 ], showing off Tcl as an AGI scripting language and softphone [L9 ]:

2003


Summer 2003 "XP Testing without XP" by Lisa Crispin, discusses agile programming and testing. Lisa mentions that most of the software her team develops is in Tcl. Unfortunately, no real Tcl code or tools are specifically mentioned here. http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=2


March 20, 2003 David Welton announces his interview with several TCT members is available at http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3003 . Notice that at the bottom of the page is a place for readers to contribute their comments and observations regarding Tcl.

The equivalent /. story is http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/10/229219&mode=thread&tid=156

In December 2003 issue of SysAdmin magazine, on pages 13-16, Dale Southard writes an article titled "Deploying Modules", which discussions the Modules Tcl based package for managing paths and environment variables in a shell environment.


In the January 2003 issue of SysAdmin magazine, on page 55-56, Chip Castle writes a review of Visual Cron version 2.1.


Feb. 2003 article on the suitability of Tcl/Tk for a CMU project - http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/03.reports/03tn001/03tn001.html It's important to check out the google thread responding to this article - start with [replace this string with a link to msg nntp:[email protected]]

In June 2003, an article concerning the use of Tclx's Keyed Lists appeared at http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/06/27/tcl.html .

In Dec 2003, a young person's intro to programming, using Tcl and Tk as the language, was published beginning at http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/12/16/begin_programming.html .


2002


http://www.vendian.org/language_year/ is an article summarizing significant events in various scripting languages, including Tcl, for the year 2002.


In January 2002 issue of SysAdmin magazine, on page 29-32, Brent Bice writes an article titled "Network Diagramming and Monintoring with Scotty".


Michael Schlenker writes: "There is a 5-page article about tclhttpd in the august issue of the german Linuxmagazin (08/2002), written by Carsten Zerbst.

The full text seems unavailable online.

Some (very simple) example listings from the articel can be found at ftp://ftp.linux-magazin.de/pub/magazin/2002/08/Feder-Lesen ".


In June, 2002 a tutorial on the use of Vtk and Tcl to create 3-D data visualizations appeared in MacDevCenter. Note the article is written for MacOS X users, but others may find it helpful as well. http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/06/28/data_visualization.html

2001


http://www.opensource.apple.com/news/index.html

16 October 2001 - Tk ported to Mac OS X v10.1 Apple announces a native port of Tk version 8.4a4 for Mac OS X 10.1. Tk is a rapid application GUI toolkit used by Tcl, Perl, and Python. The Tk release allows script developers to run existing GUI applications with a native Aqua look and feel directly on Mac OS X v10.1. As part of Apple's ongoing commitment to Open Source, this port has been released under a BSD-style license. Apple's changes have been and will continue to be submitted to the main Tcl/Tk CVS repository at http://tcl.sourceforge.net/

2000


An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl for a search/string-processing program. http://www.ipd.uka.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprt_computer2000.pdf

Real reports of about 80 implementations of the same problem by different people, in a variety of languages. The paper draws conclusions on performance, speed of development, reliability and the like.


http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/November2000/article174.shtml is an introduction to Tk with a difference - at the top of the page are links to translation of the article to 5 languages: French, Englsih, Nederlands, Russian, and Turkish.

1999


Mike Schwager had his article Automating Your Site with Expect published in the November 1999 issue of Sys Admin magazine (page 49-54).


Computerworld featured the NBC control room in January, 1999: http://www.computerworld.com/news/1999/story/0,11280,33629,00.html .

1998


http://www.javaworld.com/ is an online magazine which has published several articles relating to Tcl. For instance, http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-02-1998/jw-02-infoworld.javabeans.html and http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-1997/jw-12-jacl.html are articles about Jacl.

1997


There is a PDF article from July/August 1997 at http://computer.org/internet/ on Agent Tcl. Robert Gray also published an article in Dr. Dobbs Journal, March 1997, discussing Agent Tcl D'Agents (formerly Agent Tcl).

1996


http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/web/ADASS/adass_proc/adass_95/assond/assond.html A Tcl/Tk-Based, Intelligent Graphical Editor for Preparing HST Programs from Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems V ASP Conference Series, Vol. 101, 1996 George H. Jacoby and Jeannette Barnes, eds.

1993


There's also http://www.computer.org/dt/dt1993/d2046abs.htm , an article about an early 80s effort to create a C++ binding for Tcl and a debugger.

Unorganized


The Tcl/Tk Journal never got past the first issue, but had a couple of good articles on CGI and architecture.

The "Way Back Machine" has the one and only issue at [L10 ].


Cameron Laird is writing a new column called Tcl Counselor, which can be found at http://www.zdnet.com/developer/ (See index [L11 ]) Cameron also keeps his own index [L12 ]

Larry Virden: Be aware that some browsers (at least SPARC Solaris Netscape Communicator 4.76!) has 'indigestion' with the zdnet.com site. That is to say, when I try the above pages, some render, some don't, some take a very long time to render, etc. Don't blame the author for the sins of the webmasters...


You can see articles at http://www.sunworld.com/ , including quite a number of references in the Regular Expressions column [L13 ], also written by Cameron Laird.

I don't know what definition of article was intended by the creator of this page, but http://www.usenix.org/ has quite a number of articles and papers that have been presented at conferences or published in their monthly journal which relate to Tcl and Tk, including a semi-regular column by Clif Flynt.

The X Resource, a publication by O'Reilly's, has published a few articles on Tcl and Tk. Unfortunately, I don't think the articles themselves are available only - the source from the articles is available on ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/xresource/issue11/ though.

WebReview did an article on Tcl which is available at http://webreview.com/wr/pub/freeware/tcl.html .

Text versions of articles from ;Login: regarding Tcl can be found at http://reality.sgi.com/employees/jes/home.html .

At http://www.w3j.com/ you find the archives of the WWW Journal, a publication by O'Reilly's which covers the world of the Web. A number of articles have been published relating to Tcl ; use their search engine to find the currently available ones.

Byte Magazine had a few articles specifically about Tcl over the years, as well as references in a number of others. See for instance http://www.byte.com/art/9602/sec11/art1.htm

 http://www.byte.com/art/9704/sec5/art5.htm 

and if you search their site, you will also find references relating to products reviewed which use Tcl.

The Developer.com site did a profile on John Ousterhout at http://www.developer.com/journal/profiles/060398_ouster.html . There are a couple of articles on Jacl, as well as a few other Tcl references at this web site. They have created a Tcl directory at

 http://www.developer.com/directories/pages/dir.tcl.html in yet another

attempt to categorize Tcl offerings. See http://www.developer.com/reference/library/1575211025/ch29.htm for a longer article on using Tcl with Java.

The bioinformatic part of GNOMICS - the small genome sequencing group - was written 99% in Tcl/Tk. See the article on http://www.nature.com/cgi-bin/wbsp-article.cgi?art=396133A0&artlist=36482723.art:396133AO:392015AO:396109A0:396133A0:392015A0:392037A0:390364A0&def=36476ab2.def&deflist=36352b7b.def:3632fd17.def:362b44dd.def:362171c2.def:36216c9c.def:361a3df1.def:360fca6d.def : and notice figures 1 and 2 - which are Tk canvas dumps.

http://www.multimania.com/droche/article_tcl/article.html is an article in French, written for the French Linux magazine http://www.wsf.fr/pearl/linux/linuxmag.htm .

The WebTechniques http://www.webtechniques.com/ magazine continues to publish articles on Tcl and Tk on occasion. See the 1997 article on the Tcl Plugin http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1997/12/junk/ , the 1999 issue for Steve Ball's article on Scripting XML with Tcl, http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1999/10/junk/ the 2000 article on Web agents written in Tcl/Tk http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/03/schrenk/ , and many more - more than 45 hits on Tcl are found.

The Linux Gazette occasionally covers Tcl related topics, such as the article http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue49/pramode.html "Using SWIG to interface scripting languages with C/C++".

Frank Pilhofer [L14 ] has written an article on getting dynamic extensions written in C++ to work. It can be found at http://www.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/%7Efp/Tcl/tcl-c++/ in various formats. The text only covers Unix issues.

There is a brief introduction to Tcl and Tk by the developer .com site at http://www.developer.com/reference/library/0672310120/html/ch30.htm . This article appears to be related to Red Hat Linux Unleashed. and appears to have been written by Rick McMullin.

See http://cscene.oftheinter.net/CS2/CS2-08.html for an article on using Tcl as a scripting language for a C application.

Here's an introductory paper about object-orientation in Tcl [L15 ]

And a paper that describes how you can easily parse textual data files [L16 ]. The idea is that you change the TCL syntax so that it fits your data file format, then let the TCL interpreter take care of parsing.

Linux Journal [L17 ] has several articles on Tcl, Expect, etc., as well as software reviews, etc.


Linux Today [L18 ] runs articles on Tcl.


Linux Gazette occasional covers Tcl related articles, such as http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue49/pramode.html , which is an article on SWIG.


At Linux Month, there are [L19 ] there is Tcl coverage in various articles.


Search http://www.ieee.org/ for a variety of articles on use of Tcl.


Dr. Dobbs Journal http://www.ddj.com/ sponsers the Tcl-URL! regular articles, as well as publishes the occasional article on Tcl. For instance,

and many more. Last time I checked, this url [L21 ] returned 90 or more hits on Tcl at the DDJ site.


element k publishes a journal on DBM. They have published articles on OraTcl such as http://www.elementkjournals.com/dbm/0007/dbm0071.htm


O'Reilly's publishes all sorts of articles - here are a few articles relating to Tcl

  • Creating PGM multicast packets using Tcl [L22 ]
  • Network test automation with MacOS X and Tcl [L23 ]
  • Visual Tcl [L24 ]
  • Tcl/Tk [L25 ]
  • XStick [L26 ]

Feel free to add links to others as you find them.


Carsten Zerbst has a column on Tcl/Tk for LinuxMagazin [L27 ].


Tom Wilkason writes in comp.lang.tcl:

There was a recent article on Tcl for EDA in EETimes

http://www.eetimes.com/story/design/OEG20020103S0067

To kick off an open source effort for EDA Tools in Tcl, see http://www.tclforeda.net

If you are interested


[It appears this page was truncated at some point :-( ]


IBM developerWorks article on Expect can be found at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sc1?open&l=443,t=gr - warning, you may have to cut and paste that URL due to wikit problems with URLs.

Also, an article on XML tools and Jacl can be found at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xjacl?open&l=443,t=gr


"Perl guru Charlie Stross" nicely introduces Tcl to the Linux Format [L28 ] audience in his "What on Earth is Tcl?" [L29 ]. Quibbles are minor, and most exacerbated by publishing delays: URLs are given for scriptics.com and neosoft.com rather than tcl.tk. He fails to credit the Expect book properly for its coverage of Tk. Overall, it's plenty readable and useful. Patrick Finnegan summarizes: "it's ideal for proselytising managers and potential Tcl programmers."


There are various Tcl related articles at http://www.macdevcenter.com/ .


"Using Tcl as Application Glue for the Enterprise" [L30 ]


"OI to Tcl/Tk Migration for WFO-Advanced" [L31 ] Big! (3MB)


The Great Computer Language Shootout: http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/

A comparison of the performance of 30 languages spread over 25 benchmark tests. The performance alone is interesting, but not the most valuable aspect of this site. Being able to see the same piece of code implemented in different languages is a great way to get an idea for the syntax and style of a language. No matter how fast or expressive it is, you have to like programming in it for it to be a worthwhile choice.


I'm uncertain whether this really falls into this category or not: Embeddable Fuzzy-Logic-Toolkit Software for Tcl/Tk [L32 ]


See http://www.sei.cmu.edu/publications/documents/03.reports/03tn002.html and thread [[email protected]]

escargo Both of these articles refer to tcl as "Terminal Control Language." I thought it was the "Tool Control Language." That's what it is according to the Acronym collection. If the writers of these articles can't even get the name of the language right, what else might they be wrong about?

MDD: Actually, it stands for "Tool Command Language"


http://www.linux-magazine.com/ appears to have published over 30 articles related to Tcl - the most recent being in August, 2003. These articles are available in PDF format. See, for instance,

David Zolli has an article published in the French edition of Linux Magazine at http://www.ed-diamond.com/produit.php?produit=160 .


CL mentions http://www.amag.com/documents/s=8955/sam0310web1/ in connection to information about Expect.


Since 2002, Michael J. Norton has been publishing pieces [L33 ] nominally about Mac OS X, but which generally can be interpreted in terms of Tcl scripting for all the usual platforms.

In Jan 2005, Michael Norton wrote an article concerning the use of Tcl to manage binary trees. http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/01/28/tcl.html?CMP=ILC-macrss&ATT=Scripting+a+Binary+Tree+Using+Tcl


RLH - Now doing an article would be a good way to show that Tcl is alive and well (marketing). If Tcl articles started showing up in Linux Mag and the like it might get people to at least look at what Tcl has to offer.

LV Perhaps. Someone should try to write something up, see if any of the Linux or Unix magazines will publish it, then let other authors know where tcl is not on the banned list.


LV Dec 15, 2005, Over in comp.lang.tcl, there has been discussion about starting an online magazine for Tcl at http://www.tcltalk.com/ . If you would like to contribute material for the magazine, contact the editor as listed on that page.


[L34 ] is a page on Tcl articles. Though the web site is French, the articles appear to be a variety of languages.


AM Here is a list of scientific papers mentioning Tcl


See also Tcl Bibliography for very old references.


Category Documentation