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Summary - This suite of four programs is powerful but pricey. Still, given the time it will save you, it's worth a look. (3,200 words)
Free software products like the Linux operating system and Tcl scripting language are now important and valuable enough to spawn their own commercial add-ons. One such is the TclPro "development environment," which promises to multiply the productivity of professional programmers. But does it fulfill that promise?
Who's who and what's what
Tcl (Tool Command Language) and its GUI sidekick Tk (Toolkit) have been available in one form or another for more than a decade. John Ousterhout originally designed Tcl as a freely available embedded command language when he was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Over the past decade Ousterhout, now chief executive officer of Scriptics, has nurtured Tcl into a formidable standalone scripting language that rivals the likes of Perl and Python. One of its great strengths is its platform independence: Tcl code can run virtually unchanged on platforms as diverse as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, and most every version of Unix, including, of course, Linux.
After almost four years in the mid-'90s as a Sun Microsystems division head, Ousterhout decided to spin off Scriptics to develop commercial products and services based on Tcl. TclPro was Scriptics' first product. Scriptics also maintains the official open source distribution of Tcl and Tk.
So what is TclPro? TclPro is a development environment that Scriptics created to make it easier to develop and maintain robust applications that use the Tcl language. TclPro is actually a suite of tools: a debugger, a static analyzer, an application "wrapper," and a byte compiler. In addition, it comes with an enhanced version of the standard Tcl distribution that incorporates many of the most popular Tcl extensions.
First impressions
TclPro 1.3 installed from its CD under Linux without a hitch. To the best of our knowledge, it works equally well with all glibc2- based distributions.
TclPro is not an integrated development environment (IDE) as that's generally understood. There is no single executable from which you can access all the components. Instead, you get four separate programs: procomp, prodebug, prowrap, and procheck. In addition, there are two "pro" versions of the Tcl and Tk...