[247] in java-interest
relationship between Java and Tcl/Tk
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jon Piesing)
Fri Jun 9 05:24:44 1995
From: Jon Piesing <jon@prl.philips.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 1995 10:09:36 +0100
To: java-interest@java.sun.com
One of my colleages pointed out the following text from Suns WWW server
concerning Tcl/Tk (http://www.smli.com/research/tcl/team.html). Is there
a large overlap with Java or am I dreaming ?
Jon
Jon Piesing
Philips Research Labs, Redhill, UK
=========================================================================
What's Happening At Sun Labs
The Tcl/Tk team at Sun Labs has three overall goals:
* To continue the development of Tcl and Tk in order to make them
attractive for an ever-increasing community of users.
* To create the infrastructure that allows Tcl and Tk to be used as a
universal scripting language for the Internet. Among other things, we
hope to enable a variety of interesting applications in Internet
commerce.
* To create value for Sun Microsystems while maintaining the free nature
of Tcl and Tk.
This document provides more information on the philosophy, projects, and
people that make up the Sun Labs effort.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The vision: universal scripting and active content
Our overall goal is to make it possible to write scripts (both GUI and
non-GUI) that will run unchanged on any machine in the Internet. If they are
GUI, they will present themselves using the native look and feel of the
platform on which they execute. Tcl will provide a secure execution
environment so that you will be able to execute incoming scripts without
fear of viruses or other damage to your machine, even if you don't trust the
source of the scripts. As authentication mechanisms become available, Tcl
will use them to allow a variety of levels of trust of incoming scripts.
We think that a universal scripting language will enable many exciting new
applications. One example is active documents. An active document is one
that contains both the data of the document and a set of scripts to control
its presentation and propagation. The document can be delivered to a
recipient by many mechanisms, such as e-mail or the World-Wide Web. Its
scripts can then be executed so that it can interact graphically with the
recipient. Once the interaction is complete, the document's scripts can take
other actions such as making entries in databases. The scripts can also
forward the document elsewhere around the network. Active documents subsume
work-flow applications as a subset, but they could also be used for purposes
such as active advertisements.
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