What
versions of Palm OS does Palm Tcl support?
What host operating systems can be used for Palm OS development using Palm Tcl?
What kind of license does Palm Tcl have?
Is there a Visual IDE for Palm Tcl development?
Where can I learn more about the Tcl language?
Where can I learn more about Palm OS programming?
Palm Tcl runs on V3.0 or higher of Palm OS. It currently
does not make use of any additional features that were added to Palm OS after
version 3.0.
The official hosting environment for Palm Tcl is currently
Windows NT/Windows 2000. However, any system for which the thirdparty open
source tools par and pilrc are available may be used for development. This
includes Linux and other Unix platforms.
Palm Tcl itself, including the run time library and source
code, is distributed under a BSD style license and may be used for any purpose
without fee, including in commercial applications. Note that the documentation
is copyrighted and that third party open source tools that are distributed with
Palm Tcl may have their own licenses. See the LICENSE.* files in the various directories
for details.
Palm Tcl itself does not come with an IDE. However, there is
an independent open source effort under way to build a Visual IDE environment
on top of Palm Tcl. Toucan,
written by Mac Cody, allows visual layout of screens and generation of Palm OS
PRC files for Palm Tcl applications.
The Palm Tcl documentation only describes the features that are specific to Palm OS. The book Tcl and the Tk Toolkit by John Ousterhout (Addison-Wesley) describes version 7.6 of Tcl on which Palm Tcl is based. See Reference pages for Tcl commands that are implemented in Palm Tcl. http://tcl.activestate.com is a good starting point for the numerous Tcl related resources on the Web. http://tcl.sourceforge.net is the home for the latest version of Tcl. Clif Flynt has a nice tutorial on Tcl.
The
official Palm OS documentation is available from Palm Computing. In addition, the Palm Tcl
documentation contains references to several books on this topic. These
references are useful even if you do not program in C, as they contain a
general description of Palm OS features.