Caubweb: Detaching the Web with Tcl

Caubweb is a research system that allows a user to create local collections of Web documents on the user's computer, for access to those collections when disconnected. The system is part of a project investigating ways to provide adaptive, ongoing read and update interaction with Web-based information, even under conditions of variable or intermittent network connectivity. Caubweb is architecturally an HTTP proxy augmented with value-adding capabilities. To accommodate our design principles of platform-portability and extensibility, we used Tcl as our implementation language. This paper reports on our experience in using Tcl/Tk to build Caubweb. We discuss the structure of our implementation, identify strengths and weaknesses of the language and its tools, contrast Tcl/Tk with alternatives, and present a "call to arms" for the Tcl/Tk community, to promote increased reuse and cooperation.