Background information on Starkits

Starkits started life under the name "scripted documents", but as several people pointed out (see also [1]) the term is too technical, and not very descriptive.

Sooo... Starkits it is, based on the acronym for Standalone runtime plus kit, which refers to the fact that it lets you build your own solutions.

A brief historical perspective on where it all came from, as far as I can reconstruct it in 2003:

1996

first public release of Metakit, my embedded database engine ("hand-crafted" in C++)

1997

Metakit grows up, moves to memory-mapped files, and becomes multi-platform

1998

my first more serious encounters with Tcl/Tk (and Python)

1999

Metakit 2.0 is released in December as open source, with bindings for Tcl and Python

2000

"Scripted Documents" are presented at the Tcl/Tk 2000 conference in February, Austin TX

2001

the Tcl'ers Wiki starts to grow, it's one of the first very active and public starkits

2002

lots of activity (commercial use), the new name "starkit" is born, Critcl evolves

2003

ActiveState switches to Tclkit/Starkit/Metakit for their Tcl-based distibutions

Along the way, several significant (well, for me) developments have taken place:

• Mark Roseman got me started on Tcl in the first place, and helped design and define the Mk4tcl extension
• Gordon McMillan wrote Mk4py and helped me understand better how scripting extensions should be written
• Jan Nijtmans extended his "Plus patch" distribution to support a new wrapping mechanism, using a ZIP archive at the end of an executable
• Paul Duffin and Jan Nijtmans implemented the "stubs" mechanism, which allows loading Tcl extensions dynamically into a statically-compiled main program
• Cameron Laird was an early adopter of tclkit and starkits and helped "spread the word"
• Jeff Hobbs made a number of crucial changes to the core to support scripted documents (the EOF script separator, and turning Tk into an optionally loadable extension)
• Matt Newman invented and implemented the Virtual Filesystem Layer for Tcl, nearly 100% scripted (!), and wrote the first VFS drivers for Metakit as well as ZIP archives
• Vince Darley re-created the whole concept in C, submitted a TIP (#17), and got it accepted - which is why VFS is now a standard core Tcl capability
• Steve Blinkhorn quickly understood the relevance of it all in the real world, and made sure techies like me would "get it"
• Steve Landers took Critcl and turned it into a package which can deliver binaries, ready to be incorporated into starkits

What can I say? What this illustrates IMO, is how open source software can evolve beyond all expectations, with phenomenal contributions from great people all across this planet...

And the journey is not over yet!

-jcw