Book Image

Tcl 8.5 Network Programming

Book Image

Tcl 8.5 Network Programming

Overview of this book

Tcl (Tool Command Language) is a very powerful and easy to learn dynamic programming language, suitable for a very wide range of uses. Tcl is regarded as one of the best-kept secrets in the software industry. This book gives you a hands-on experience on Tcl, helping you develop network-aware applications using this mature yet evolving language. This book shows you how to create network-aware applications with Tcl language. Packed with practical examples, the book not only takes you through the implementation of network protocols in Tcl, but also key aspects of Tcl programming. The book starts with the basic element of Tcl programming as we take a look at the syntax and fundamental commands of the language. To get us ready for network programming, we look at important Tcl features such as object-oriented programming, accessing files, packaging in TCL, event driven programming, and multithreaded applications. To create standalone single-file executable applications with Tcl we take a look at the Starpack technology, and ensure that we’ll be able to create robust applications with a thorough coverage of troubleshooting and debugging Tcl applications. The book is really about network programming, and it will not let you down with its deep coverage of these topics. Of course we look at protocols, but there are plenty of practical examples to keep things moving along. We start with the TCP and UDP protocols, and look at some other protocols to see examples of synchronizing time with other servers, querying user information and authenticating users over LDAP and performing DNS queries. The book explains Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which is often used for monitoring and gathering information from various devices, such as routers, gateways, printers and many other types of equipment. We’ll also look at web programming in Tcl; processing the requests coming from the clients via the HTTP protocol and responding to these requests. You’ll be able to create a complete solution for creating a client-server application in Tcl. To round things off, you’ll see how to secure your networked applications, build public key infrastructure into your application and use Tcl’s safe interpreter feature to reduce risk of running code from unknown source.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Tcl 8.5 Network Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
4
Troubleshooting Tcl applications

Summary


Tcl offers support for a wide range of standards for remote method invocations. We can use it for accessing APIs available from other applications or services. We can also export our own functionality.

We can interact with other applications using XML-RPC, which is widely used by websites as it is easier to implement and lightweight. All that is needed is to know the methods and arguments they take; we can then easily access methods from other applications. Our application can also benefit from SOAP. Similar to XML-RPC we can invoke commands over SOAP. In this case we only need to know the URL of the WSDL file, which is a definition of the web service, the methods it offers and all data types related to it.

Despite the advantages of easy integration with different languages and technologies, the SOAP standard has a major drawback. As it is uses XML and is designed to be self-descriptive, the overhead of metadata in each request is very high and SOAP should not be used for communication...