Tcl/Tk: The Swiss Army Knife of Web Applications

For some projects, you may want to do more than the browser is able to support. By providing the end user with a plug-in, you get the benefits of being able to run a real application right inside their existing browser without too much of a hassle. One drawback to most plug-ins is that they run only under Microsoft Windows, making them unsuitable for real cross-platform work. Tcl's plug-in doesn't have this problem—you can download precompiled binaries for Linux, Solaris, SunOS and yes, even MS Windows. You may also find that by the time you read this, it has been ported to other platforms as well, such as the Macintosh OS.

Using the plug-in, you can run Tclets, which are small Tcl/Tk scripts that run in a restricted (for security reasons) Tcl environment. You and your users can define just how much access you want the plug-in to provide, eliminating or rerouting commands and situations which could be hazardous to your machine's health.

Once you have a Tclet created and your users have the Tcl plug-in, reference it in an HTML page using the

<EMBED SRC>

tag. So, if your Tclet is called foo.tcl, the tag would look like this:

<embed src="foo.tcl" width=400 height=300>

Server-parsed HTML has been around for awhile, ranging from basic server-side includes (SSI) to integrated environments complete with database access. It provides dynamically-generated HTML pages without the overhead of calling an external CGI program, and makes it easy even for non-programmers to access all the functionality it provides.

Typically, when a file with a special extension such as .foo is referenced, the server scans through the HTML and looks for special tags. When those tags are found, it executes whatever instructions they contain, then replaces those sections in the document with the output from the command. Those tags could be anything from the current date to a dynamically generated HTML table with a product price list.

Several solutions exist for using Tcl as a server-parsed scripting language. Two of the most powerful commercial products are NeoWebScript from NeoSoft and Velocigen for Tcl from Binary Evolution. Both products extend the Apache web server with an in-process module, so that they are running all the time in wait mode, ready to do their work. One big difference between the two is that while Velocigen follows the common trend of using a special file extension to identify a file which needs parsing, NeoWebScript follows the more traditional SSI structure of embedding the command in comments. Examples are shown in Listing 3 and Listing 4.

With these more advanced server-side parsers, you can also obtain a level of data persistence through internal variables. For example, you could make a web scavenger hunt on your site to keep a list of the visited pages, and when all the required ones have been seen by a particular user, that user wins. Wins what? I don't know—let marketing worry about it.

You won't be able to go out and compete with Apache for market share, but web servers created in Tcl are easy to write, extensible and portable across all platforms. As we saw earlier, sockets are easy to implement in Tcl, which gives you more time to focus on customizing the server to meet your needs, rather than spending it on getting the basics to work.

If you want to see a nice implementation of this concept, take a look at Tcl-HTTPD, freely available from Scriptics. It has CGI support, server-parsed scripting and a host of dynamic configuration options, just to name a few aspects. More basic examples are also available from a variety of Tcl sources on the web, as well as an excellent article by Steve Ball and a white paper by Brent Welch. (See Resources.)

Tcl provides an easy way of addressing almost any web programming issue. With a large development community, a wide selection of extensions and freely available function libraries, it is a web power tool waiting to be discovered. Whether client- or server-side, you get a lot of options without a lot of hassle.

Resources