Starpal - TCL Development and Starkit generation

Starpal - Tcl Development and Starkit generation

This is what Starpal looks like:

Let's say you wanted to work on a file called web.tcl and you wanted to turn it into a .kit file. Here's how you would do this.

Wouldn't it be nice to see a menu choice of 'Starpal'?

If you did have this menu choice then you would see the dialogL

If you did pick 'Ok' then you'd see the wsf to qwrap it like

Then you'd be asked 'Do you want to Unwrap web.tcl'

and if you replied 'Ok' you'd see the unwrap command run

and you'd then see the Starpal's main screen.

Starpal auomatically determined that the TCL file had no KIT file and walked you through the neccesary steps to make the .KIT file, which is a Starkit file, as well as cleverly automatically switching you to the .KIT file.

Here's how you'd establish your menu choice in Windows

You'd need to do this by setting up your .tcl option in Windows. You'd need to have an executable tclkit-win32.upx.exe and a downloaded starpal.kit. If you do, you'd do this by

picking "Tools>Folder Options>File Types" from Windows 98 getting the "Folder Options" dialog.
Then click on "Active Tcl Scripts" and then click on the Edit button getting the "Edit File Type" dialog.
There you have the list of actions. You would add a new action by clicking on the "New" button getting the "New Action" dialog.
There you'd enter "Starpal" on the "Action" line to name the action.
Then you'd need something like:

   "E:\@dev\starkit\tclkit-win32.upx.exe" "E:\@dev\starpal\starpal.kit" "%1"

Then you'd hit "Ok" all the way out of your dialogs.

Here you'd need to have an executable version to run tclkits, mention the name of Starpal and "%1" says to supply the name and folder of the .tcl item that you'd picked. That's it!

Even futher, if you already has a .KIT file exist when opening the .TCL file, you would have seen

If you had asked to unwrap your .KIT file and you already have the web.vfs subfolder you would have seen

which would have warned you about the situation but still would have allowed you do overlay the web.vfs file system.

Is anyone interested in it?

wcf3 This looks nice...I'm interested :-)

ZipGuy 04/21/05 Here's where you can download starpal.kit from [1]

LV 2007 July 11 The starpal.kit URL above appear to no longer be valid.

LV That last image isn't showing up on the page. Also, I didn't understand why there were two buttons for edit, or for that matter why a wrap and run button when you have a wrap and a run button?

What other features might be useful in such a tool? Perhaps a stand-alone wrap mode?

ZipGuy 04/15/05 Lots of questions. The last image didn't show - it wasn't introduced nor present.

Why are there two buttons for edit? Good question! Let's just read them. Hmm.... looks like

"ML Edit - Navigator, Syntax Highlighting" (ML - Heavily Modified & Improved)

or

"Xedit - Navigator"

So, it let's you choose two editors with different features. I guess it just edits the web.tcl file which is below the web.kit file in the sub-folder web.vfs/lib/app-web/ . Further, if you don't have Xedit.exe or ml.kit on the subfolder of Starpal then, shazam, it puts them there so it can use them! Also it unpacks the file called wsf.kit which is used for Wrapping and UnWrapping purposes for Windows. Notice that ml.kit can run the alternate file called ../main.tcl which is in the above folder. This in turn will run web.tcl which is the saved version rather than the web.kit file! Also you could use the button "Run xxx.vfs/main.tcl" to do this as well.

Why have a "Wrap + Run" button? Simple because you wanted both and didn't want to have to wait for "Wrap" and when it finished hit "Run".

'Stand alone wrap mode'? What are you talking about?

RHS Another option for editting might be just to have one Edit button, but make the editor to use (or the command to run in order to edit) configurable. That way, folks could use the editor of their choice.

ZipGuy 04/15/05 I'd like to add a fourth button for your configurable editor as you have the two included inside the package and are unpacked out to the Starpal folder. Then I suppose it would be nice to have the three buttons to be present when checkmarked from the menu.

schlenk On Windows one could just check the registry for the program registered to edit the given file type, on unix one could try to read the $::env(EDITOR) variable set on some machines, and a simple configure dialog to set the default editor. If one really wanted to support multiple editors, maybe just add a tk_optionmenu for selecting the editor and a edit button to invoke it.

DKF (3-Nov-2005): Hmm, for some reason the images don't load when I view the wiki page but I can see them when I view them directly (using RightClick->ViewImage). Some kind of HTTP Referer blocking on the server?

14-Jan 2007: The Link to downloadpage above is dead