Re: Commercial/Shareware and Extensions ?

Thanks Mark! I have some follow-up questions below if you have a few
moments;

Mark Roseman wrote:
>
> 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.

Not sure if I follow here. I'm not very familiar with the GPL license.
  Are you saying the fact that TCL has fewer GPL libraries is a good thing?

>
> 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.

I was hoping Tile (implemented in 8.5) would save the day here as I'd
definitely like to target OS X ... any thoughts there?

>
> 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.

This is good to know. For me Tcl/Tk offers some key advantages:
excellent portability, ease of development, ease of deployment, SQLite,
availability of extensions, open source. I think C++ is probably
superior is some areas and Java is superior in others but that Tcl/Tk
overall offers the best solution. With Tile being a key enhancement.

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

Looks like a great read, I'll give it a look, thanks!
Received on Thu Sep 29 14:24:10 2005