Tcl Dev Kit

Tcl Dev Kit is a commercial development environment for Tcl based on the original TclPro created by Scriptics. TclPro was released to the open-source community in November 2001. ActiveState has enhanced Tcl Dev Kit with new tools and more features. The development environment includes ActiveTcl^[*], which is an extended Tcl platform that includes [incr Tcl], Expect, and TclX. These extensions and Tcl/Tk are distributed in source and binary form for Windows and a variety of UNIX platforms. More information is available at this URL:

^[*] ActiveTcl is a trademark of ActiveState Corporation.

http://www.activestate.com/Tcl

The current version of the Tcl Dev Kit contains these tools:

Debugger with Coverage

The Debugger provides a nice graphical user interface with all the features you expect from a traditional debugger. You can set breakpoints, single step, examine variables, and look at the call stack. It understands a subtle issue that can arise from using the update command: nested call stacks. It is possible to launch a new Tcl script as a side effect of the update command, which pushes the current state onto the execution stack. This shows up clearly in the debugger stack trace. It maintains project state, so it will remember breakpoint settings and other preference items between runs. One of the most interesting features is that it can debug remotely running applications. The debugger also has built-in code coverage and hotspot profiling analysis. I use it regularly to debug Tcl code running inside the Tcl Web Server.

Checker

The Checker is a static code checker. This is a real win for large program development. It examines every line of your program looking for syntax errors and dubious coding practices. It has detailed knowledge of Tcl, Tk, Expect, [incr Tcl], and TclX commands and validates your use of them. It checks that you call Tcl procedures with the correct number of arguments, and can cross-check large groups of Tcl files. It knows about changes between Tcl versions, and it can warn you about old code that needs to be updated.

Compiler

The Compiler is really just a reader and writer for the byte codes that the Tcl byte-code compiler generates internally. It lets you precompile scripts and save the results, and then load the byte-code later instead of raw source. This provides a great way to hide your source code, if that is important to you. It turns out to save less time than you might think, however. By the time it reads the file from disk, decodes it, and builds the necessary Tcl data structures, it is not much faster than reading a source file and compiling it on the fly.

TclApp

TclApp assembles a collection of Tcl scripts, data files, and a Tcl/Tk interpreter into Starkits and Starpacks, which are described in Chapter 22. TclApp provides a more friendly user interface than the sdx command line tool described in that Chapter. The Tcl Dev Kit comes with pre-built Starkit runtimes that include Metakit, Expect, [incr Tcl], and TclX.

Tcl Service Manager

The Tcl Service Manager helps you turn your Tcl application into a service for Windows NT/2000/XP. Services have to implement special OS interfaces that are not supported by tclsh or wish. You can create services that use the DLLs and scripts from an existing Tcl/Tk installation, or create stand alone services that have no external dependencies.

Inspector

The Inspector is an improved version of the tkinspect application that lets you look at the state of other Tk applications. It displays procedures, variables, and the Tk widget hierarchy. You can issue commands to another application to change variables or test out commands. This turns out to be a very useful way to debug Tk applications. The original tkinspect was written by Sam Shen.