Purpose: you have one or more .tcl scripts which work fine when you 'source' them into a Tk interpreter (or a tclkit).  Now you'd like to distribute or package these scripts as something that looks as much like a platform-native application as possible.

There are two things you might wish to do:

(i) interact 'natively' on the given platform

(ii) package the files nicely (so the user sees a single executable)

Now, there is lots of discussion on (ii) -- [tclpro], [tclkit], [freewrap], etc are all attempts to solve this problem, but this page addresses the other problem, (i).

(i) may require the following (depending on the platform):

   * (A) a nice icon which the user double-clicks on to launch your application.
   * (B) the ability to drop one-or-more files onto an icon to launch your application with those files (to process, edit, convert, email, etc...)'
   * (C) if your application is already running, the ability to drop one-or-more files onto an icon to process them using the existing process
   * (D) adding your application to the platform's list of available applications (for use by 'open with...' dialogs, etc).
   * (E) the ability to use your application as a command line tool (>yourapp fileone.txt filetwo.txt')
   * ''feel free to add more''   

How can we accomplish these on all sorts of different platforms?  In its simplest form, how can a user make a single .tcl script ''appear'' like a real application as much as possible?

'''Windows'''

On windows, any .tcl script can be double-clicked on to launch it with 'wish'.  A nice icon can be added, not to the .tcl script, but to a shortcut which is created to point to the script (and that shortcut can appear in the ''Start'' menu) [[add refs]].  This accomplishes part of (A).

If we add a batch file, we can do at least some of (E).

'''MacOS'''

??  The 'drag n drop tcllets' allows you to make little applications quite easily.  Does this do enough?

'''Unix'''

does this depend on whether you use gnome or kde or?  In what sense can a shell script appear as an application?

'''MacOS X'''

This is largely like Unix, except that we want to look like a native macosx application with an icon, appear in the dock, accept drag'n'drop, etc.

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What would be very nice would be a ''small generic application'' executable, compiled for each platform (like a small tclkit) which contains enough code internally to perform all of the above, and to allow you to change the icon, change registered file types/extensions, register itself with the OS, etc, AND which can produce, on demand, a modified copy of itself which you can use for your application.  (If it could then, automatically perform some version of (ii) and bundle up a lot of others files at the same time, even better).

I envisage this, at least on Windows, MacOS (X), to be an executable that you run, and it pops up a Tk interface which asks you:

   * name of application
   * .tcl script for your application
   * icon for application
   * accepts drag'n'drop? (if so, then what types/extensions, and what Tcl procedure to call when items are dropped).
   * ...

Then you hit 'go', and it creates a new executable 'yourapp.exe', say, which does all of the above.