Toucan is based on Tcl/Tk (of course!) and provides an environment for developing Palm Tcl applications using Tk widgets to give an approximate appearance to the Palm Forms interface. It is not a 100% perfect look-and-feel (at least with the initial versions), but it is sufficient for the user to design the Forms interface and create the Tcl scripts to glue them all together.
The intent is that once the Palm Tcl application is developed, the IDE will convert the relevant Forms interface elements into a resource script file and place the Tcl glue scripts into a separate script file. Once this is done, the resource script file can be passed through Pilrc (version 2.8), sourcing in the Tcl glue script file at that time. Finally, par (version 00.05.01) will combine the binaries generated by Pilrc with the Palm Tcl library to form a Palm resource file ready to download into a Palm PDA or Pose.
Toucan runs on both GNU/Linux/X Windows and Microsoft Windows platforms, though current development is on Slackware Linux 8.0 with TclTk 8.4.
© 2004 Mac A. Cody
Last updated Friday, November 19, 2004