Who should attend: Applications developers and programmers building real-world applications with Tcl/Tk. Participants should be familiar with Tcl/Tk, but expertise is not required.

The BLT toolkit is a treasure chest of useful components for Tcl/Tk applications. It contains essential widgets, such as a tabbed notebook and a hierarchical listbox, which are not part of the standard Tk distribution. For scientific or business applications, BLT has plotting widgets that support X-Y graphs, strip charts, and bar charts. BLT also adds support for drag-and-drop operations, handling "busy" windows, smooth image scaling, compositing encapsulated PostScript, and much more. Like Tcl/Tk, BLT runs cross-platform on UNIX and Windows 95/98/NT machines.

In this tutorial, students will get an overview of the BLT components and see how those components can be used to build better Tcl/Tk applications.

George Howlett has been using Tcl/Tk for more than 10 years as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, developing software for Electronic Computer-Aided Design (ECAD). He is an ardent fan of Tcl and has taught more than 50 Tcl/Tk courses. He is also the author of the BLT Toolkit, an extension that adds widgets and commands to Tcl/Tk. His chapter on "The BLT Toolkit" is part of Tcl/Tk Tools, published by O'Reilly & Associates. George is currently a Senior Consultant at Cadence Design Systems, Inc.