3. Overview of current state

• This is Version 0.32a, still considered alpha state.
• The demo app can be built by invoking "sh calc.sh" on all supported platforms (CygWin32 comes with a bash shell, so that will work). You must have Gobo Eiffel geyacc installed.
• There is a prebuilt binary just for a quick test: calc.linuxelf for Linux-Elf (really :-)
• Demo app "calc" now interpretes everything arriving in Tcl from Eiffel as a Tcl script and evaluates it. It also has a Quit button now.
• This is a complete redesign compared with Version 0.20a.
• Single Smalleiffel servers can be connected to single Tcl/Tk GUI clients via a particular socket.
• Multiple connections to a server are not yet supported.
• The GUI can be created using Visual Tcl (from www.neuron.com, not SCO Visual Tcl!).
• The code uses the SmallEiffel garbage collector.
• The Observer/Observable stuff from v020a is not contained in v032a yet. This stuff is not dependent on the presence or absence of a socket-based connection between Tcl and Eiffel, but is a design model of its own. I would like to focus on multiple scanners and parsers first. If anybody needs observers *now*, he/she should drop me a mail and I would see how to get it into the current version quickly again.
• The "calc" demo is tested on Linux, on Win95 with CygWin32 and on an HP-Apollo 425e (m68k) workstation running HPUX 9.0.0 without changing code, both with client and server running on the same platform and crossover on different platforms with an ethernet connection between them. You only have to adapt the host address inside the Tcl code from "localhost" to the correct server address to connect to the the server of your choice.
• A test some days ago showed that the code is compilable with lcc-win32 but does not run for currently unknown reasons. I dont know how to use the WinSock library yet and think that I do something wrong here (maybe the Winsock library has to be initialised explicitly?).
• Mac is currently unsupported. I dont have any access to a Mac system neither do I know anything about Mac programming. Any volunteers to look at my C code (socket_util.c)? 153 lines only!
• I have tested the code now on a HP-APOLLO (m68k) workstation running HPUX 9.0.0 (yes, that is old stuff, but the machine was really cheap :-). As this worked without any code changes I dont expect major porting problems on the different flavours of *nix.