This page describes the First European Tcl/Tk Users Meeting held, June 15-19, 2000 in Hamburg, Germany.
The presentations of this meeting are available at the http://www.eurotcl.eu/preasteventations.html#eurotcl2000%|%EuroTcl site%|%.
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The notes below are primarily from [Jeffrey Hobbs] except as otherwise indicated.
I know the title was officially the First European Tcl/Tk User Meeting,
but it was so successful I'm calling it a conference anyways.
I'll give some overall thoughts and then go to a session-by-session
review of some notable bits. For all that this is a LONG message, a
lot went on in that short time which is worth noting (and thus reading,
of course :^).
The overall mood of the people there was excellent and you could
easily say things went very well overall.
Attendance was officially 65 (65 people paid the DM 100 fee), but
more were evident in attendance (I'd say as many as 75 total). The
attendees were 2/3 from Germany (conference was in Hamburg), with
the last 1/3 being spread around Europe. It's hard to say specifically
why the it was so strongly Germany weighted, there were many proferred
opinions. The high-tech branch in Germany is clearly one of the strongest in Europe. The conference was in Germany. It was only implicitly made known that the conference was in English (everyone there took that for a given, but someone noted they weren't 100% sure). Outside the newsgroup, the event was only minimally advertised in a German computer magazine (ix). You can add your speculation, but all in all, the attendance was actually much higher than expected, especially given the low-key advertising for it.
So onto the sessions...
The first talk was the Tcl Update, which I gave. It was an abbreviation
of the talk that John Ousterhout and I gave at Tcl'2K. The roadmap
poll (asking users what they would like to see) turned out somewhat
differently than from Tcl'2K. The results were (in votes for each, out
of approx. 70 people):
3 Improve Tcl Performance
12 Smaller, more modular core
5 Archive file support (.jar/.zip)
25 Standard Libraries
5 Unix binary distributions
20 Tcl Installer
25 Standalone executable support
8 Further Java integration
12 Drag & Drop
8 Improved Windows Tk performance
25 Printing support
8 Tk abstraction layer (TkGS)
7 Megawidgets (roll your own)
35 New standard widgets
8 Focus on I18N issues
3 Thread support for Tk
In contrast, the most important item at Tcl'2K was to improve Tcl
performance. The issue of themes (skins) came up at one point, in
a discussion between Tk and Gtk. While I agree that it looks sexy
and would be an optional nicety, I asked how many users would
actually use it in app they would ship, and *noone* raised their
hands.
In another interesting difference, Unix was an important platform
for almost every user at Tcl'Europe, with Windows important to
about 40%. At Tcl'2K, it was about 80% Unix and 50% Windows. Each
had a few where Mac was also important.
''Andreas Kupries'' followed with a discussion of Stacked Channels.
He gave a good background on the needs for it, the history, and the
basic structure.
''Uwe Zdun'' continued with a paper on XOTcl. This was a paper that was
also presented at Tcl'2K and makes good reading. XOTcl really is an
object model based on the Tcl philosophy, and Uwe went through some
examples of how it can be used.
''Juergen Schoenwaelder'', author of Scotty, followed with a paper titled "Married with Tcl". It was similar to Don Libes' paper on writing Expect. It was a very good experience paper that describes maintaining an extension over time, and the love and pain that has to go along with it.
Following that was a CORBA Language Mapping for Tcl paper by ''Frank
Pilhofer''. He previously wrote TclMico, know called Combat, which ties
Tcl into CORBA as both client and server.
Next in line was ''Jochen Loewer'', with a paper on tDOM, a fast XML/DOM/XPath extension for Tcl. I don't want to go into the technical details, but for those working in similar areas here, this is probably a good paper to read. Keywords DOM, SAX, XPath, Serialization, XML-RPC.
''Jeffrey Hobbs'' followed on with his second talk, this one on Ajuba2. He gave a rough overview, with the breakdown of the parts.
''Oliver Schmelzle'' made a very good presentation on Vignette's work,
focusing on StoryServer, and the new V/5. Oliver focused on the
architecture of StoryServer, and how they manage the 10s of millions of
hits to a site. At one point he noted that Vignette was "having to" move
away from Tcl into ASP and JSP due in part to customer demand, but also
due to the lack of being able to find Tcl developers.
Following that was a talk by ''Anselm Lingnau'' on mobile agents. This is an
area where Tcl has been used before. It had some interesting research
aspects, but the summarizing point was made at the end where in response
to a question he admitted that the killer app for mobile agents hasn't
really been found.
The first of two presentations from Patschke & Rasp was given by ''Ahmet
Keskin'' about a Load Testing app in Tcl/Tk. This was a classic app paper using an interesting and popular area for Tcl - testing. This is a repeat of a Tcl'2K paper again, but a good paper nonetheless.
That wrapped up the first day. A lot of chatting went on during the
breaks, lunch and the following dinner. Someone will probably have to
come along and shake my brain to get all the tidbits out though. On to
the next day...
Friday started off with another app paper presented by ''Matthias Lüttgert'', describing an application for
managing the db data associated with waste water management that is
actually used by German municipalities. It was essentially a walk-through
of the app, with reasoning behind cause and effect for choosing Tcl.
It was very classic in how they came to Tcl. A project started in 1991
with C/Motif, and migrated to Tcl in the mid-90s with significant success.
'''Jan Nijtmans'' followed with a discussion of his Wrap application, which
creates a standalone Tcl executable. They are working on more elaborate
solutions for the future (better obfuscation, ...).
''Franco Violi'' was next with a talk about integrating Tcl/Tk into legacy applications. This didn't seem to have an interesting title, but then I found out that this meant putting a Tcl interpreter into COBOL!!
With all the event loop and everything. This was rather clever, and
made for an interesting talk.
''Carsten'' gave a quick talk, more of a WiP on ASED (a Tcl/Tk based
programmer's editor) and MSGedit, which is a message catalog editor.
After the break, ''Michael Haschek'' gave a talk on T-IDE (Tcl IDE), work
being done in cooperation with ICEMCFD. This is a SourceNavigator
like development environment in and for Tcl.
Following that was a presentation of VisualGYPSY, a Tcl/Tk GUI
builder by Patscke & Rasp that has been recently released as open
source. It's still supported, and looks like a useful GUI builder,
if you need to recommend one to anybody.
''Lindsay Marshall'' (of tclCheck and Frink fame) gave a talk on his
tools, which were basically the first well-known static syntax
analysis and pretty-printing tools for Tcl. It was a funny talk,
and the tools do many interesting things to boot.
''Hartmut Schirmacher'' presented tmk, a Tcl Make tool. There are a
series of tools along these lines also noted in the paper. There
are always two camps, fairly hardened, on whether one should move
away from the ubiquitous, but not totally functional, make, into
Makefiles that can be truly scripted.
Following that was a talk by ''Andreas Otto'' on a new [OttoCompiler%|%Tcl
compiler%|%] (to C code). This has been questioned on the newsgroup because
people thought from his fragile use of English that he wasn't quite aware of
the intricacies of Tcl and that it just wouldn't work 100%. Well, it was a
very good talk and showed a potentially promising compiler based on sound
principles. He even plans on making a Java backend. I was convinced that he
knows what he's doing and that it could be useful for some. Of course, it's a
commercial product...
After that was another talk by ''Anselm Lingnau'', this time on his
personal project TkDVI, which is a TeX DVI previewer. It had some
cool features, but still needs some work on getting embedded PS
and such.
''Steffen Werner'' gave a presentation on XTCC, a tape control system
written in Tcl/Tk that worked in very high-end mission critical
systems. This was a good example of a successful use of Tcl/Tk
in yet another mission critical area.
''Andrej Vckovski'' of Netcetera presented Webshell [http://websh.com], an app we've seen
before at conferences that is reaching v3.0. The interesting new
features are that it is thread-safe, to make it a perfect match
for the threadable Apache 2.0 release. He noted that Tcl is
uniquely poised for Apache 2.0 because it is the only scripting
language that has mastered the multi-threading arena to date.
The final paper was from ''Carsten Zerbst'', a discussion of some of
the work he has been doing for his PhD thesis. It was an application
to deal with handling of data from various sources. It used CORBA
and Tcl together. This was paper 2 on CORBA/Tcl integration at the
conference, and another alluded to it (Loewer's IIRC). There was
definite impetus to push farther with CORBA/Tcl work from several
there.
So that was all the primary content. As I said, lots went on in
side discussions as well, but this message is long enough already.
On a final note, everyone was quite satisfied with how things went,
and there are plans to try and organize something again next year.
Carsten will announce later this year whether he will be able to do
the organization again, or whether they'll have to look to someone
else (like Usenix's European cousin).
I'd also like to thank Carsten for taking the time to organize this
event. The stimmung was positive and the outcome very good. It was
an impressive and valuable return for the effort that he put in.
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Notes from [Andreas Kupries] (not as detailed as Jeff's)
I am glad that I went to it. I fear that I mostly talked to people I
already knew by sight or at least by name. Oh well. It was good to get
some more pictures into my memory.
The event wasn't as thoroughly organized as if it had been done by
USENIX or similar organization, but given the fact that it was done by
a single person it was excellent.
Thanks, Carsten.
Carsten already said in his posting that there were about 70
people. Officially registered are 65, but from the sight of it it
could have been around 80. Expected by Carsten were 20 to 30. We had
people from Norway to Greek and Italy, so it was a truly european
event. But despite this high geographic variance the actual
distribution of nationalities was much more skewed. Meaning ? See the
attendance list aggregated by nation below:
------------------------------
USA 1 Guess who ? (One try only)
Greek 1
Austria 2
Italy 2
Norway 2
Netherlands 3
<Unknown> 3
Great Britain 5
Swiss 5
Germany 41
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We don't know whether the high number of german attendants is due to
the fact that the event was held in germany or due to a higher usage
of Tcl here.
The talk I liked most was the one from Lindsay Marshall about his
'static testing tools' tclCheck and frink. Actually the inofficial
title was rather
Brace yourself. Two Tcl Testing Tools.
Appropriate, given their concern with bracing in Tcl.
Future is unsure. Carsten is bent on doing his PhD thesis and after
that he is not sure about remaining in academia (and thus being able
to organize the next event). Given the domination of german(-speaking)
attendants most thought it better to have the next event in a
different country and see what comes out of that.
A possibility which came up was to ask the Netherland chapter of
USENIX to organize it. If that is done it is likely that the next
event will be held in Maastricht.
But nothing is fixed yet.
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