Now that Sun has released the source to SpecTcl to the Tcl community,
is there any group or any one working on developing or maintaining
SpecTcl? Searching with Altavista, I have seen very little mention of
it. Have people decided vtcl merits more effort? Or are most just
sticking with a text editor?
I think that SpecTcl already helps quite a bit on application
development and has potential for being a nice Tcl/Tk development
environment. Some directions that SpecTcl could be taken in are
-- adding menu design into SpecTcl by integrating, e.g., menuedit by
Ken Corey into SpecTcl.
-- the ability to add composite widgets to the palette, e.g.,
standard menu bars, tabbed preferences, etc.
-- integration of a Tcl-aware editor, such as Emacs, with SpecTcl to
ease the generation and maintainence of both GUI and non-GUI
code.
-- integration of a tcl de{*filter*} to test the application.
-- creation of a project file to manage a multi-file, multi-window
application.
-- modifying the Java code generator to make way for Jacl and Tcl Blend.
-- adding choice of packer and placer geometry managers to individual
windows and frames.
Although some claim that the simplicity of the Tcl/Tk language renders
a GUI builder irrelevant, I disagree. Designing a good GUI requires a
good deal of experimentation with the various possible layouts and
bindings. Even for someone well-versed in Tcl/Tk, drag and drop
widgets are quicker and substantially lower the barrier to
experimentation. For those who are not as well-versed in Tcl/Tk, The
GUI-builder allows them to do what they would probably not do
otherwise and allows them to learn by reading the generated code.
What do you think?
-Mark
--
Mark Kvale, neurobiophysicist
http://www.*-*-*.com/ ~kvale/
SpecTcl Development ?