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Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

tanzer.io

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Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#21

Does the name imply it's influenced by Perl's Dancer framework? http://perldancer.org

That's right. The developer has commented about it at http://wiki.tcl.tk/40701 : >xan 2014-10-12: It sure is named after Dancer! However, one of the big draws of tanzer is that it doesn't expect a request handler to read the entire request nor response in one single go, which should hopefully allow for much better performing web applications without standing in one's way much.

Forwarding for xan due to HN new account comment limits:

Yes indeedy! Although as my rather more florid verbiage points out, I do endeavor to make it as anti-framework as possible and more like a library. But then I suppose the only difference between a framework and library, one might posit, is often the presence of an event loop or some damned thing.

As part and parcel to a super ultra mega marketing blitz to remind people of the existence of Tcl and indicate to the world that it never really died, it is my solemnly sworn duty to help plant the seeds of a small ecosystem which unifies the divergent elements of the Tcl web framework ecosystem into one that rather more resembles Perl, in that there are so many wonderful middlewares to bridge gaps everywhere.

I developed tanzer to try to be the least common denominator of them all, and to somewhat offend (but in a polite way) Node.js' dominance by forcing the agenda of a language that already has a quite nice event loop and asynchronous I/O built in, thank you very much. :D

Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#22
post #4

How prevalent is Tcl usage in the real world? You don't hear much about it, are there any new startups adopting it? Or is it only used in legacy projects at large companies?

It's my first choice if I have to build a standalone app with GUI. With freewrap you can build an executable for Windows and the same source works for Linux.

I wonder why it isn't more popular.

Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#23
post #22
post #4

How prevalent is Tcl usage in the real world? You don't hear much about it, are there any new startups adopting it? Or is it only used in legacy projects at large companies?

It's my first choice if I have to build a standalone app with GUI. With freewrap you can build an executable for Windows and the same source works for Linux. I wonder why it isn't more popular.

There is a strong sentiment that Tk is not attractive/not platform specific enough.

(I guess this has been at least somewhat remedied in later releases, but that doesn't necessarily have people taking a second look)

Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#24
post #20

[deleted]

Relaying for xan:

I'll have you know tänzer is a lady! And a very improper one, at that.

In lieu of answering a more technical inquiry, I shall iterate my reasoning for being so persistent in cranking out this piece of software. Quite frankly, it's on account of me becoming quite ROYALLY PISSED with dealing with Impostor Syndrome all these years; it was such to a crippling degree that only today have I bothered even considering getting a Hacker News account. I felt I was a nobody, that I could NEVER possibly belong in the pantheon of bearded programming gods and shiny, happy goddesses, so I lurked.

Until this year, wherein I got a proper bonk on the head from a very lovely handful of people in the Perl community who encouraged me to make an ass of myself on stage with a talk on Filesys::POSIX (which I wrote). And I may have pooped out a blag post on Impostor Syndrome along the way, on http://xantronix.net/.

Anyway, pursuant to the idea of utterly crushing and subsequently extinguishing Impostor Syndrome inasmuch as I possibly can with my available wherewithal, I wrote tänzer as a labor of love to myself, and as a tribute to the concept of minimalistic antiframeworks (like antimatter, but antithetical to bulky frameworks instead). So far I think I've succeeded, given that I wasn't quite ready to blast this to the world yet (at least not without some really good profiling and a quite requisite, complete testsuite), people thought it good to release this to the hordes anyway.

Such is life. Consider writing software as a love letter to yourself occasionally. It's like taking a bath with candles and some real lovey-dovey music on in the background.

Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#25
I have just took a quick glimpse and the source seems to be written very clearly. It is an excellent example of how coding in tcl looks like. Perhaps this could be used as an example when you are learning to program in tcl.

I don't use tcl neither I know what the actual state of available libraries the performance is, but tcl honors its fame as an easy to read language, this is not Perl.

One feature I like a lot is the ability to create secure interpreters that bypass military specifications.

Perhaps some benchmarks could give us an idea of what is the current state of affairs in the tcl world, but sometimes the bottle neck code just recurs to calling C libraries. I didn't see that ffi calling here.

Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#28
post #4

How prevalent is Tcl usage in the real world? You don't hear much about it, are there any new startups adopting it? Or is it only used in legacy projects at large companies?

I certainly don't think it's terribly common anymore, but there's still a bunch of stuff out there that uses it. I've seen it most often as a scripting extension to some larger software package (e.g. visual molecular dynamics: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/). OpenACS is also built on tcl/aolserver and was an early framework for building community web sites that's still around and still getting updates: http://openacs.org/ The "expect" program is a handy thing to have in your toolkit as an easy way to automate things and is implemented in tcl.

Re: Tänzer – An industrial web server framework for Tcl

#29
post #6
post #4

How prevalent is Tcl usage in the real world? You don't hear much about it, are there any new startups adopting it? Or is it only used in legacy projects at large companies?

I know a couple of startuppy companies that are still using it, but it certainly feels like a language in decline. There's a lot that's elegant about it, but the syntax is awkward in practice, and compared to e.g. Python there are fewer libraries available and no really compelling advantage, IMO. It's a language that deserves better than it got - it should've become the standard for *nix config files (thanks RMS for…

> There's a lot that's elegant about it, but the syntax is awkward in practice

Don't you like the language (TCL) or the way how GUIs are created? You can also code in C++/Tk for instance.

http://cpptk.sourceforge.net/

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