Version 15 of ezsdx - a small frontend for sdx

IT's IN PROGRESS of being updated, not done yet!

Zipguy 03/2012 - I'm currently working on ezsdx.kit which is refreshing my knowledge which was rusty all over.

I love windows, and hate it. It will make an easy version for Windows people which will include SDX and make it easy to use. When all you have is a great.tcl, want to convert it to a kit (great.kit), unwrap it, Wrap it back up, or even better be able to Wrap & Run so you can test it.

Zipguy 2013/10/05 - You can click on the Zipguy link to get my email address. I've been using ezSDX for about 9 months, and it has come along nicely! It tries to watch out, for someone who's a rookie, or sleepy, and has made a mistake. It does seem relatively bullet proof, and almost ready for an initial release (close, but not quite).

ezSDX v0.98a

Welcome!

It was written to run only on Windows! Sorry for all you others on non-Windoze machines. ezSDX - Simplifies SDX Usage v0.97d was written by Zipguy on 2013/10/05 Web Site: [L1 ]. You can click on the My Tcl Desktop link, in my home page, to see ezSDX on it.

Details

This program was written to make it a lot easier to run myprog.tcl, convert it to a starkit, myprog.kit, or even to an exe, myprog.exe.

ezSDX makes it easy to convert it into a starkit, namely myprog.kit. You can make small changes to your source code, save them in your editor, and click on the"Wrap & Run" button, here in ezSDX, to re-wrap myprog.kit, and re-run myprog.kit. ezSDX makes it extremly easy to "Wrap & Run" the starkit, myprog.kit, many, many, times.

Also, once you've got the starkit, myprog.kit, working well, you can use ezSDX to create myprog.exe from the starkit myprog.kit, and you can use ezSDX to run, the freshly produced myprog.exe, from ezSDX.

That will make it what's called a Starpack, which is good and bad.

The good news, it's an executable. It will run.
The bad news, it will only run on the operating system that you're on.

In other words if you're on Windows, you have someone download it to a Apple machine and run it, it will fail almost every single time.

Can I use it just to run a .tcl file?

Yes you can! You could edit a TCL file (myprog.tcl) in any Editor you choose. So first, when you've just started ezSDX, you first should find myprog.tcl, using the "File:" button.

If you've done that, you should see the buttons "Run", "QWrap", "Unwrap", "Console" and "Exit" buttons. The button you'll be interested in in the "Run" button, for now.

If you've made some changes, to your source code, in your editor, what you should do is:

save it in the Editor, and then
click on the "Run" button, here in ezSDX, to run it.

One editor, that would be better, is one that understands TCL, as ML does. Web Site: http://www.geocities.ws/thezipguy . You can click on the My Tcl Desktop link to see ML v1.25 on it as well.

Can I Convert myprog.tcl into a Starkit?

Yes, you can. Assuming you have been using ezSDX to run myprog.tcl, to convert it to a starkit you should Click on the buttons in this order:

"Console" button. This will open up the Console
"Qwrap" button. This will quick wrap it up using SDX. Also ezSDX will change the file from myprog.tcl to myprog.kit
"Unwrap" button. Look in the console to make sure it works.

If you've done that, you should see the buttons have changed a lot! You used to have only the 5 buttons before. Now you should have 8 buttons.

Now you should see the buttons "Wrap & Run", "Wrap", "Run", "Unwrap", "Make .exe", "Run .exe", "Console" and "Exit" buttons, more on what they do later.

What you should do is close the Editor you're using, and re-open the Editor on myprog.tcl, which was written in the sub-folder \myprog-vfs\lib\app-myprog,

In any case, ezSDX will make it extremly easy to "Wrap & Run" myprog.kit many times. If your Editor understands starkits, like ML does, you may be able to run it without wrapping it first.

What just happened?

Well to explain it, let me give you and example. I'll start with a .tcl program, show you why you might need to make it a starkit, get it working properly, and how to turn it into a Starpack, namely a .exe program.

I downloaded the program from the page Creating image photo data from GIF files. I named it gif2base64.tcl. So, I hit the file button in ezSDX to pick it, like this:

Then I was presented with a Windows File Dialog which looked like this:

What I had to do was change the field "Files of type: " to "TCL Scripts (*.tcl)", pick the file called gif2base64.tcl, and click on the "Ok" button. When I did that I got a screen that looked like this:

This meant that the console window was in front of the main window, so I had to click on the main window, which looked like this:

Then I had to click on the "Run" button, which took a second or two, an then I saw this:

That looked terrific, because the program called gif2base64.tcl, was actually running on my laptop. Hooray! So I had to navigate to the folder, which contained .gif files in it, like this:

When I clicked on "Ok" it looked like this:

So, I picked the file I wanted to see (at the bottom) by double clicking on it, but YIKES, I had an error!

Then I clicked on the "Details..." button and saw this error message:

What just happened? Why do I have to edit another copy of my program?

What happenned is that you "Qwrap"'ed it and "Unwrap"'ed it. Those two operations created a second copy of that program, slightly modified, in a folder named \myprog-vfs\lib\app-myprog which would be named the same as it was, in other words myprog.tcl. That means that you've converted it to a starkit makeable file, along with some other files, under that \myprog-vfs subdirectory it just created for you. That means that the editor session that may be open on myprog.tcl, should no longer be used! What you should do is open the file myprog.tcl, under the folder called \myprog-vfs\lib\app-myprog. It has changed only one line, namely:

  package provide app-myprog 1.0

for you. Just leave it alone, and continue to make changes, to your hearts delight. When you want to try the changes you've made, hit the save option in your editor, and use ezSDX to do that for you.

All you have to do is go back to the ezSDX window, and click on the "Wrap & Run" button. I hope you understand this well.

Can you give me an Example of converting a .tcl into a .kit?

Sure, let me give you and example. I'll start with a .tcl program, show you why you might need to make it a starkit, get it working properly, and how to turn it into a Starpack, namely a .exe program.

So what do you think of ezsdx? Should I rename it to easysdx? Any opinions?

I've got the old icons from ML 1.20 and got viewicons.tcl and all their icons from http://www.satisoft.com/tcltk/icons/viewIcons.html . Also, I've got some icons using my improved version of gif2base64.kit from the page Creating image photo data from GIF files.

2012/03/23 - Zipguy - I've got it working, and am at v0.14. Analyzing icons so far, candsidering whether to turn them on/off, or whether to include SDX and have it unload it from the ezsdx.kit.

sdx