[Xotcl] XOTcl 0.83 available

[Gustaf Neumann]

Dear Tcl Community,

This is the first public announcement of 'Extended Object Tcl' (XOTcl)
in this mailing list. XOTcl was derived from the impressive OTcl
language developed by D. Wetherall and C. Lindblad at the MIT in '95
and extended in various ways. In short, XOTcl tries to provide a
highly flexible, reflective, component-based object-oriented
environment. It integrates language support for high level concepts,
which are not found in other languages, with reasonable
performance. Nevertheless, it prevails the Tcl programming style and
the dynamic/introspective nature of the language, rather than
introducing other language's styles and rigidness (such as C++) into
Tcl.

Since it was our aim to combine new ideas from the object-oriented
community with the component glueing concepts of Tcl, we presented
XOTcl so far primarily to the scientific community in the areas of
object-orientation, design patterns, and web development. Now we
believe that XOTcl implementation has reached a fairly good quality in
terms of stability, speed and memory-leaks, and therefore we decided
to make this public announcement of the XOTcl release 0.83.

The XOTcl paper presented at the Tcl/Tk conference in February 2000
described XOTcl version 0.80. The most important changes in the newer
releases are:

 XOTcl Language:
    - improved configurability and portability
    - support for mixin interceptors at the per-class level (instmixins)
    - various new predefined XOTcl methods operating on variable names
      (exists, append, lappend, incr, array)
    - various speed improvements
    - deep copy/move for all aggregations
    - free of memory leaks and invalid memory references (tested with Purify)

 packages:
    - new documentation tool (see tutorial)
    - substantially improved components for XML and RDF
    - better support for HTML forms (e.g. file upload)
    - support for secure places via SSL
    - more example programs
    - improved documentation (still a long way to go)

  packaging:
    - provision of XOTcl in the RPM and SRPM format

The XOTcl distribution contains aside of the implementation of the
language a growing set of components. We developed them as a prove of
concept that the concepts of the XOTcl language can be used as a
powerful environment for practical applications. The XOTcl
distribution contains for example a Web communication infrastructure
(HTTP client and server), support for persistent objects, a mobile
code system, important Web formats (such as XML and RDF), and general
reusable components based on design patterns.

General information about XOTcl and its components can be found
at    http://www.xotcl.org 

Best regards,

Gustaf Neumann
Uwe Zdun