Overview

The technical documentation for a multi-platform capable functional system becomes necessarily just a bit more complex than that designed, for example, for a single version of a single platform. While Tcl/Tk makes implementation across all supported Tcl/Tk platforms much faster, it doesn't necessarily make the documentation that much easier. On each platform, the porter may add a tweak here, or there, to iron out what to the original design is a nuance, but to the user on that machine, especially one with proper concerns for security, functionality, and possible interaction with other programs, there seems to always be something.

Yet, this is essentially a single-source client/server suite. Although packaged in a .zip file for Windows, .bin.hqx for MacIntosh and .tar.gz for various UNIX® and Unix-like platforms, the contents are nearly identical, and the operation is as much the same as they can be. For that reason, don't be surprised if documentation across various platforms, referenced below, look very much the same. They should.

Platforms

AS-400

Java and Tcl-Blend

Macintosh

UNIX® and Unix-like

VMS

WindowsTM

The OpenVerse System

The OpenVerse system is a many-client to many-server setup. Both the server and client applications are written in Tcl/Tk initially. For heavy use servers some hardcoded optimiszations may become desirable, possibly in the integration with a dynamically loadable database. As distributed, the server is a non-graphical single script (except on platforms where ALL networking is forced into the GUI), while the client is a graphically more intensive (Tk Canvas based) item, except when tossed into text mode.

Server and Client run as separate processes, and not necessarily on the same machine.