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Fourth Annual USENIX Tcl/Tk Workshop, 1996
Tcl/Tk in the Development of User-Extensible Graphical User
Interfaces
John M. Skinner, Richard S. LaBarca, and Robert M. Sweet
Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Abstract
This paper describes the use of Tcl/Tk in the development of
user-extensible Graphical User Interfaces. We describe a GUI that
provides two facilities, employing Tcl/Tk, that allow its users to
extend the basic GUI at runtime. The first facility is a built-in
mini Tcl/Tk GUI builder that gives users the ability to generate new
screens that are automatically incorporated into the existing GUI.
This is accomplished at runtime and does not require the user to write
any code. A second feature allows for the incorporation, control, and
access of data from, pre-existing Tcl/Tk screens without modification
to the original source code of those screens. Program extensions
accomplished with these facilities are integrated seamlessly into the
original program, and are available immediately, as well as in
subsequent executions of the program. In addition to the
demonstration of a specific application of these methods, we will show
that the techniques are transferable to other applications.
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