Thursday, May 20, 2004

Tcl_Dev_Kit 3.1 - Building TclApps

Tcl_Dev_Kit 3.1 - Building TclApps

So for the last week I have been messing around with this Expect script, fondly known in my office as the WardGUI, it will allow a NOC technician the ability to choose a specific community switch location, then the slot and port number associated with a specific house and finally the services that need to be enabled for that location. The script works, needs some spit and polish and to actually have some files to pull the variables from but it delivers the goods on my one test switch. (Please see the UTOPIA project if this makes no sense to you.)

So then I decided I needed to get fancy and as I like to consider myself a bit of a *nix nut let's add some fun to the mix. Originally the GUI part was going to be driven from the web but then I got the bright idea I could wrap this whole thing up in a pretty little TclApp - this would allow me to run it on my happy Mac, the Windows XP box I have been beating the script out on or the FreeBSD box I originally wrote the Expect script on. Now the people in the audience are watching this and someone just whispered, "you know you could do that on all those machines with a web interface?" Yes, I know that but where's the challenge and besides I am building it and you're not, so leave me alone.

To most programmers this would seem quite trivial - they could more than likely knock this little doodad out in a day but to a non-programmer (I build networks man!) this has been quite a struggle. ActiveState is doing their best to help me accomplish this with their documentation, and demos. I will let you know how this thing turns out.

If anyone has any good TclApps that I should take a look at let me know. Might as well learn how to do this right the first time.

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