Background information on Starkits

Starkits started life under the name "scripted documents", but as several people pointed out (see also [1]) the term is too technical, and not very descriptive.

Sooo... Starkits it is, based on the acronym for Standalone runtime plus kit, which refers to the fact that it lets you build your own solutions.


A brief historical perspective on where it all came from, as far as I can reconstruct it in 2003:

1996
first public release of Metakit, my embedded database engine ("hand-crafted" in C++)
1997
Metakit grows up, moves to memory-mapped files, and becomes multi-platform
1998
my first more serious encounters with Tcl/Tk (and Python)
1999
Metakit 2.0 is released in December as open source, with bindings for Tcl and Python
2000
"Scripted Documents" are presented at the Tcl/Tk 2000 conference in February, Austin TX
2001
the Tcl'ers Wiki starts to grow, it's one of the first very active and public starkits
2002
lots of activity (commercial use), the new name "starkit" is born, Critcl evolves
2003
ActiveState switches to Tclkit/Starkit/Metakit for their Tcl-based distibutions

Along the way, several significant (well, for me) developments have taken place:


What can I say? What this illustrates IMO, is how open source software can evolve beyond all expectations, with phenomenal contributions from great people all across this planet...

And the journey is not over yet!

-jcw