What's the most important thing lacking in your Tcl toolbox?

Over the years, I've seen many people post about how tcl should have
this or that to compete with this language or that framework.

That's not what this posting is about.

What this thread is about - hopefully - is identifying areas in which
you, as a tcl developer, have a need, but have been unsuccessful in
locating a solution.

Maybe it is a tool, or maybe it is an extension. Maybe it is an
example or a tutorial.

I hope that people feel free to post a quick note mentioning specific
needs that you have, and that other readers feel free to chime in with
suggestions for meeting those needs.

For instance, if someone were to post that they have a need for
calculating some specific checksum for some particular kind of data,
and someone else knows of a place where that kind of code might be
found, feel free to post the location. Or, if you don't know of a
place, but perhaps have created a page over at http://wiki.tcl.tk/
that discusses the issue, feel free to mention that.

What I hope to see in this thread are those undiscovered gems that I
am certain reside out there around the net, or strategies for solving
the problems, along with, hopefully, some updates on the wiki to help
future developers.

Thanks!

Larry W. Virden wrote:

> I hope that people feel free to post a quick note mentioning specific
> needs that you have, and that other readers feel free to chime in with
> suggestions for meeting those needs.

For me, the biggest missing piece is the ability to take the contents of
a text widget and print it out while retaining most of the formatting.
Every commercial product I've worked on that was implemented in Tk has
struggled with the lack of a decent printing solution.

--
Bryan Oakley
http://www.tclscripting.com

Larry W. Virden <lvirden@gmail.com> wrote:
> What this thread is about - hopefully - is identifying areas in which
> you, as a tcl developer, have a need, but have been unsuccessful in
> locating a solution.

Most of the things on my wishlist are GUI interface matters:

* Some more of the Tk widgets going into Tile would be good. Having a
platform native spinbox and text widget would be useful, for example.
No doubt these things will be added in due course :-).

* A way to have a completely flat button widget in either Tk or Tile
on Mac OS X in button bars. Specifying -relief, etc, in Tk doesn't work
at present.

* Freshening some of the other Tile widgets on Mac. In particular,
notebook tabs are looking increasingly unusual.

* Handling of .icns files in the Img package could be handy.

* A standard API for handling printing. The back-end would be different
per platform in terms of setup, but, it would be useful to have a Tcl
script be able to call something like:

set lpt [::printer::use default]
lpt print $data

... and have the data sent down the wire to whatever's on the other end
in whatever way their OS handles it normally.

No need for info from per-platform printer dialogs, lets just have an API
which lets us manipulate them:

set allprinters [::printer::get all]
set lptinfo [::printer::get default info]
set allprintersinfo [::printer::get all info]
::printer::set default [lindex [::printer::get all] 0]

Synic wrote:
> Larry W. Virden <lvirden@gmail.com> wrote: 
>
> Most of the things on my wishlist are GUI interface matters:
>
> * Some more of the Tk widgets going into Tile would be good. Having a
> platform native spinbox and text widget would be useful, for example.
> No doubt these things will be added in due course :-).

What's a "platform native text widget"? It's just a big white (or
whatever) square. Are you thinking about a bunch of built-in controls
for bold, italics, etc?



--
Bryan Oakley
http://www.tclscripting.com

Bryan Oakley <oakley@bardo.clearlight.com> wrote:
> Synic wrote: 
>
> What's a "platform native text widget"? It's just a big white (or
> whatever) square. Are you thinking about a bunch of built-in controls
> for bold, italics, etc?

Nah. I mean, as in handling of the widget border, as far as 3D effect
and highlight colour go.

Even after matching highlight colours, etc, there's a noticeable
difference between the way borders are handled between the Tk text
widget and the single line ttk::entry widget. It's something especially
visible on Mac and present on Windows. Not too noticeable on X11, IIRC.

Larry W. Virden wrote:
> Over the years, I've seen many people post about how tcl should have
> this or that to compete with this language or that framework.
>
> That's not what this posting is about.
>
> What this thread is about - hopefully - is identifying areas in which
> you, as a tcl developer, have a need, but have been unsuccessful in
> locating a solution.
>
> Maybe it is a tool, or maybe it is an extension. Maybe it is an
> example or a tutorial.

I have done great things with Tcl in the past so it is one of the most
complete tools that I have used.  Having said that, I think the following
could be added and/or improved:

1) Increase the efficiency and flexibility of smtp and smtpd.  Pehaps
this is
more of a tutorial type of thing.

2) Handling for other messaging protocols like instant messaging.  Perhaps
this exists already and I am simply unaware of it.

3) Tutorials or introductory use cases for many packages (soap, tile,
etc.).

Is that 3 points or just one?

TCL has built in event handlers, easy writing to sockets, easy http...

but...

1) writing TCL web serverices via SOAP is not at all easy.

G.Lester's 'Web Services For Tcl' is a start, but it only works for
tclhttpd.

The world is XML and SOAP 5 years ago and tcl is still lacking.

2) tdom8.1 is the best xml parser (but it's been sitting in CVS for 2+
years) and has no release date...

3) tcl 8.5 needs to be released.

Bryan Oakley wrote:
> What's a "platform native text widget"? It's just a big white (or
> whatever) square.

Errr, not hardly. :-) On Windows, it has all kinds of features that
systems that reimplement text boxes on their own are missing (Tcl and
Firefox/Thunderbird being the ones that annoy me most).

--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
The primary use of XML is as a technique
to avoid documenting your interchange formats.

On Aug 13, 11:43 pm, "Larry W. Virden" <lvir...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Over the years, I've seen many people post about how tcl should have
> this or that to compete with this language or that framework.
>
> That's not what this posting is about.
>
> What this thread is about - hopefully - is identifying areas in which
> you, as a tcl developer, have a need, but have been unsuccessful in
> locating a solution.
>
> Maybe it is a tool, or maybe it is an extension. Maybe it is an
> example or a tutorial.
>
> I hope that people feel free to post a quick note mentioning specific
> needs that you have, and that other readers feel free to chime in with
> suggestions for meeting those needs.
>
> For instance, if someone were to post that they have a need for
> calculating some specific checksum for some particular kind of data,
> and someone else knows of a place where that kind of code might be
> found, feel free to post the location. Or, if you don't know of a
> place, but perhaps have created a page over athttp://wiki.tcl.tk/
> that discusses the issue, feel free to mention that.
>
> What I hope to see in this thread are those undiscovered gems that I
> am certain reside out there around the net, or strategies for solving
> the problems, along with, hopefully, some updates on the wiki to help
> future developers.
>

This will sound like a broken record: Printing! At this stage I don't
care anymore about Classic Mac printing. Just support Windows GDI and
CUPS. Currently I use the GDI and Printer extension on Windows and
Canvas Postscript output and Ghostscript for other platforms but it's
clumsy to have to write printing related code twice. In addition the
Canvas + Ghostscript solution is clumsy in it's own right. Guiding
users to install Ghostscript can be tedious.

Is TkTable going to be part of 8.5 core?


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