Tcl Plugin? (Re: The Weekly Pheromone VII I9)

[Ken Cline]

On Thu, 19 Jun 1997 address@hidden wrote:

>                       ----------------------
> 
>   II.  Platform Independence
> 
>     Intel Corporation has funded an effort to make Swarm "platform
> independent."  The motivation behind such an effort is to allow
> Windows NT users the ability to run Swarm without switching to Linux
> for their operating system.  To achieve this, we decided that most of
> the difficulties in getting Swarm to run on a Windows OS lay in the
> GUI for Swarm, which consists of X, Tcl/Tk, and BLT.  The minimal
> solution to getting Swarm to run on Windows NT would be to use the X
> and Tcl/Tk tools provided for that operating system.  But, that would
> largely be a one-off hack and would be very brittle.  So, we decided
> that replacing the Swarm GUI with one written using Java would be a
> better solution.  It would address the Windows NT port and might open
> the door to other ports like to a Macintosh or OS/2 system.  Another
> major motivation for choosing the JavaGUI route is that doing it this
> way will allow us to keep only one revision branch of Swarm.  If we
> created a one-off branch of Swarm for NT, which is what would happen if
> we stuck with Tcl/Tk, then any changes made to the UNIX version would
> then have to be mirrored in the NT version.  This type of thing can
> lead to an administrative overhead that is so high as to displace
> productive work that could be done on the core package.
> 

Just out of curiosity... Did y'all try out the Tcl Plugin
that, according to the Sunscript site, allows "running  
safe-Tcl/Tk applications inside of Web browsers" ?

( http://sunscript.sun.com/products/index.html )

I would expect that the JavaGUI route is still probably a
better choice for some of the reasons you stated above.
However, I just wanted to know whether you had evaluated
the Tcl Plugin and what y'all had thought of it?


Now, while we're on the subject... Is there an official SFI
position on which version of Tcl/Tk to use?

I see that the "needed-software" ftp site provides 7.4/4.0
and 7.5/4.1.  However, from the mailing list I know there
are some using 7.6/4.2.

The reason I ask is that I started rebuilding our swarm
environment and chose 7.5/4.1 - I was thinking that 7.5/4.1 
was latest version that Swarm was guaranteed to be 99%
compatible with.  (I'm trying to pick the path of least
resistance, of course.)

Everything was going rather smoothly until I got around to
running the configure script for libtclobjc... I'm a little
puzzled by the following configure error:

   Tcl_AppInit failed: version mismatch: library scripts
   expect Tcl version 7.5b1 or later but the loaded version
   is only 105

There is only one version of tcl7.5 available at the
Sunscript site and I suspect that it includes beta1
revisions.  (Something strange happened to the copy of
tcl7.5 we downloaded from the SFI site, for some reason the
configure script was screwed up.  I have no idea what
happened but downloading another copy of tcl solved the
problem immediately.)

Well anyway, unless I hear otherwise, I was going to upgrade
to 7.6/4.2.  Any thoughts?  Comments?  Warnings?


Ken.

PS: Before I forget to mention it again... I liked the piece
on SFI & Swarm in the latest Business Week.  Good job Hive!
I don't have the article in front of me but wasn't SFI rated
#12 or #13 as a research center - did I get that right?  I
know those articles tend to be somewhat fluffy, but at least
it good PR, right?


_________________________________________________________
Ken Cline                             address@hidden
SAIC                                 VOICE (410) 571-0413
Annapolis, MD                          FAX (301) 261-8427




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