How to deploy complex tcl applications

Question

How to deploy complex tcl applications and where to find a good getting started with a minimal example?

I want to deploy the application in form of a tcl interpeter with the application tcl packages included. Preferable as one binary.

Answer 1

The canonical way to do that with Tcl is a so called starpack or starkit. A starpack is a single binary that contains a Tcl runtime and all needed scripts and extensions in a single file. A starkit does it with two files (one runtime originally called tclkit and a bundled data/script archive inside a database).

Sadly the documentation for that is a bit fragmented and unorderly these days, and there are a variety of runtimes now, that have various up and downsides.

So I'll have to provide a few more links and steps to get you into the right direction.

If you are on windows, maybe start right here on Stackoverflow with this excellent answer (just use my download links for the basekits and sdx below, as the old equi4.com links are gone): Steps to Create A Tcl Starkit on a Windows Platform

The most polished version is surely the commercial ActiveState TDK with its TclApp wrapping tool (see the docs at http://docs.activestate.com/tdk/5.4/TclApp.html), it basically shows what can be done in general with those starkits.

Outside of that, you can find a lot of information spread over the Tcl'ers wiki, start from: http://wiki.tcl.tk/52

You need one basekit of some kind, the current ones would probably the ones provided by Roy Keene (http://tclkits.rkeene.org/fossil/wiki/Downloads). You will also want SDX (see http://wiki.tcl.tk/3411 for sources to get it). Once you have those parts together, you can follow the step-by-step guides from (http://wiki.tcl.tk/10558). The Building a Starkit section at http://wiki.tcl.tk/3661 has a few more recipes.