DN636994386

Subject: Report: 1. Tcl'Europe Conference - DN [1]

Jeffrey Hobbs <jeffrey.hobbs@ajubasolutions.com> - 20 Jun 2000 - comp.lang.tcl

 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.  BTW, to
 start off with, a toplevel link to papers and other info is:
     http://www.tu-harburg.de/skf/tcltk/

 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.

 I followed on with my second talk, this one on Ajuba2.  I 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 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 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, 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.

 --
    Jeffrey Hobbs                     The Tcl Guy
    hobbs at ajubasolutions.com       Ajuba Solutions (née Scriptics)