Re: Commercial/Shareware and Extensions ?

Bugs <dont@spam.me> wrote:
> Anyone have any experience actually USING Tcl/Tk for a commerical
> application? Bad idea? Worked out great? Mixed results? Major
> problems in using Tcl/Tk for a commerical application?
> Thanks!

Have used it several times for end-user commercial applications.

As others have said, if you're going to be including libraries,
read the licenses. Tcl is no better or no worse in this regard,
though you'll find less GPL libraries than for some other open
source languages, so there's less of "that would be perfect, if
only..." reinventing the wheel.

Like any tool, make sure it fits your needs in terms of all the
capabilities you need, or if you can fill in the missing pieces.
If e.g. you want to do a GUI app that will deploy on OS X, you may
want to think carefully about whether Tk will give you the kind of
interface you want, or whether you'd want to supplement it with a
Cocoa-built one.

Overall using it has worked out well for me, in terms of gains in
development speed, etc. End user deployment, thanks to Starkits,
is truly fantastic these days. And even when we came to sell the
company behind one of applications, while Tcl raised more than a few
eyebrows and we had to do a lot more explaining than if we'd coded
it in, for example, C++, it didn't in the end prevent the sale
from happening.

A paper I did a few years ago touching on some of these issues:
      http://www.markroseman.com/pubs/tenyears.pdf

Mark
Received on Thu Sep 29 14:24:01 2005