Tcl/2K: The 7th USENIX Tcl/Tk Conference
(Tcl/2K)

February 14-18, 2000
Marriott at the Capitol
Austin, Texas, USA

Wednesday, February 16, 2000

9:00 am - 9:15 am Opening Remarks and Best Paper Awards

De Clarke, UCO Lick Observatory, and Tom Poindexter, Talus Technologies Inc.,
Program Co-Chairs

9:15-10:30 am Keynote Address

Jim Davidson, America Online, Inc.

10:30 am - 11:00 am Break

11:00 am - 12:30 pm Middleware

Session Chair: Melissa Chawla, Scriptics Corp.

Rapid CORBA Server Development in Tcl: A Case Study
Jason Brazile and Andrej Vckovski, Netcetera AG

AGNI: A Multi-threaded Middleware for Distributed Scripting
M. Ranganathan, Mark Bednarek, Fernand Pors, and Doug Montgomery, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Introducing QoS Awareness in Tcl Programming: QTcl
Roberto Canonico, Maurizio D'Arienzo, Simon P. Romanao, and Giorgio Ventre, Università di Napoli

CollabWiseTk: A Toolkit for Rendering Stand-alone Applications Collaborative
Hemang Lavana and Franc Brglez, North Carolina State University

12:30 pm - 12:00 pm Lunch (on your own)

2:00 pm - 4:00 pm Tcl Update

John Ousterhout, CEO, and Jeffrey Hobbs, Tcl Ambassador, Scriptics Corp.

4:00 pm - 4:30 pm Break

4:30 pm - 5:30 pm Testing and Integration

Session Chair: Dave Griffin, SiteScape, Inc.

GDBTk: Integrating Tk into a Recalcitrant Command-line Application
James Ingham, Cygnus Solutions, Inc.

TclTk: A Strong Basis for Complex Load Testing Systems
Ahmet C. Keskin, Till I. Patzchke, and Ernst vonVoight, Patzschke + Rasp Software AG

Using Tcl to Build a Buzzword-Compliant Environment That Glues Together Legacy Analysis Programs
Carsten H. Lawrenz and Rajkumar Madhuram, Siemens Westinghouse Power Corp.

5:30 pm - 6:30 pm Break

6:30 pm - 8:30 pm Conference Dinner

8:30 pm - 10:30 pm Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions

Thursday, February 17, 2000

9:00 am - 10:30 am Web Technologies

Session Chair: Cameron Laird, Phaseit, Inc.

Proxy Tk: A Java Applet User Interface Toolkit for Tcl
Mark Roseman, TeamWave Software, Ltd.

The Tcl Web Server
Brent Welch, Scriptics Corp.

TkGecko: A Frill-Necked Lizard
Steve Ball, Zveno Pty., Ltd.

BizConnect: An XML Integration Server Based on Tcl
Scott Stanton, Eric Melski, and John Ousterhout, Scriptics Corp.

10:30 am - 11:00 am Break

11:00 am - 12:00 noon Panel: The Tcl Community of the Next Century

Panel: Jean-Claude Wippler, Equi4 Software; Matt Newman, Sensus Consulting, Ltd.;
   Cameron Laird, Phaseit, Inc.; Jeffrey Hobbs, Scriptics Corp.
Moderator: Tom Poindexter, Talus Technologies, Inc.

A one-hour panel discussion of the Tcl community. A moderator and four speakers will discuss:

1. what Tcl/Tk resources are offered by the community (with URLS displayed by overhead projector or video projector) and whom we have to thank for them
2. what resources are offered by Scriptics
3. what shift, if any, there is towards Scriptics offering more resources
4. what this implies for the Tcl community, and what the relationship is or should be between the community and Scriptics
5. how we imagine Tcl being maintained and supported in the new century

12:00 noon - 1:30 pm Conference Lunch/Demonstrations

1:30 pm - 2:00 pm Tcl Balderdash

This continues the panel theme, but in a lighter vein. Tcl community leaders (from TclURL and other Tcl Web sites) will be asked to prepare a list of Tcl resources, some real and some imaginary; the audience will vote on which ones they believe in and which ones they don't. For the real ones, we'll show which URLs you use to find them. We hope this will be an entertaining and amusing way to publicize the wealth of online Tcl resources out there, especially for the newbies among us.

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm User Interface and Applications

Session Chair: Dave Beazley, University of Chicago

Supporting Information Awareness Using Animated Widgets
Scott McCrickard and Q. Alex Zhao, Georgia Institute of Technology

Collaborative Client-Server Architectures in Tcl/Tk: A Class Project Experiment and Experience
Franc Brglez, Hemang Lavana, Zhi Fu, Debabrata Ghosh, Lorie Moffitt, Steve Nelson, J. Marshall Smith, and Jun Zhou, North Carolina State University

Scripted Documents
Jean-Claude Wippler, Equi4 Software

3:00 pm - 3:30 pm Break

3:30 pm - 4:30 pm Works in Progress Session

4:30 pm - 8:00 pm Poster Session &
The Texas Tcl Shoot-Out

This year the Tcl conference includes a lively coding competition! A set of programming problems (separate ones for newbie, intermediate, and expert Tcl hackers) will be published just prior to the conference and posted the first day. On the evening of the second day, any submitted code will be run and judged by Grand Master Tcl programmers, and the points of style and efficiency on which the judgments are made will be discussed for pedagogical value. On the final day, a winner or winners in each category will be announced and will receive a small Tcl-related prize.

8:00 pm - 11:00 pm Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions

Friday, February 18, 2000

9:00 am - 10:30 am Extending Core Tcl

Session Chair: Matt Newman, Sensus Consulting Ltd.

The Tcl Extension Architecture
Brent Welch and Michael Thomas, Scriptics Corp.

XOTcl—An Object-Oriented Scripting Language
Gustav Neumann and Uwe Zdun, University of Essen

A Multi-Threaded Server for Shared Hash Table Access
Andrej Vckovski and Jason Brazile, Netcetera AG

Feather
Paul Duffin, IBM Corp.

10:30 am - 11:00 am Break

11:00 am - 12:30 pm Applications Show & Tell

The Tcl conference is all about sharing ideas, and the Applications Show & Tell session is a chance for your bold/original/crazy/cool/huge/tiny Tcl/Tk application or idea to be seen briefly by your peers. Participants should prepare one viewgraph (preferably with one or two screen shots for Tk apps, and a URL if applicable) and a very brief (2-5 minute) commentary. The focus can be current work, updates to previous work, grand ideas for future work, etc. No app is too small or too large to display. Show the world what you are doing with Tcl/Tk!

12:30 pm - 1:30 pm Closing Remarks
Best Poster Award
Town Meeting