Tcl in AltaVista Forum

AltaVista Forum ™ is an award-winning collaboration environment based on the open technologies of the World-Wide Web and built on the foundation of the Tcl language [pob]. Using Tcl’s inherent extensibility the AltaVista Forum toolkit provides a simple class/inheritance mechanism, an information manager customized for the data storage needs of collaboration applications, and a growing toolkit for creating asynchronous collaboration applications on the Web. This paper details how Tcl has been employed as the basis of a commercial web-based collaboration environment. While the focus of the paper will be on the design and our use of Tcl in AltaVista Forum 98, we will also touch on how the design has evolved over the past three releases of the product. Selecting the Tcl Language AltaVista Forum (formerly Workgroup Web Forum) is described pretty thoroughly from a functional standpoint in [Chiu]. If all has gone well, we will have released the third version of this product since its debut in 1995: spanning the use of Tcl 7.3 through 7.6 (and looking forward to Tcl 8). (More information can be found at