Tcl Extension Architecture

Tcl is widely recognized for its powerful extensibility. A Tcl developer can quickly and easily add any of hundreds of open source extensions to a Tcl platform, seamlessly adding new commands and functions as needed. Tcl developers are continually creating new Tcl extensions and adding them to the common library of extensions for others in the community to leverage. However, up to now, there has been no universal standard defined for building these extensions. So, each author has had to create specific documentation, and a Tcl developer selecting multiple open source extensions to use has had to learn each author's method. The Tcl Extension Architecture (TEA) is a standard set of Makefile and configure scripts used to build extensions in a uniform way. It was initially developed with input from many members of the Tcl commnity, and used for the development of the TclPro tool set.

TEA Documents

A paper on the Tcl Extension Architecture was presented at the Tcl/2k conference in February, 2000. (last modified April 24, 2001) This paper describes:

Source tree layout
Install tree layout
Using Autoconf and Configure
Standard configure flags
Standard Makefile targets
Using Stub Libraries
The sample extension

Using TEA on Windows describes the steps needed to install the tools used to make Tcl and its extensions on Windows.

Brent Welch has a chapter in his book that describes compiling Tcl extensions and the TEA standard. It is a PDF Document.

You also can read an older document about the requirements and goals for TEA. It's somewhat out of date but still has useful information:

TEA Sample Extension

There's a older sample TEA-compliant extension at ftp://tcl.activestate.com/pub/tcl/examples/tea/, but it is recommended to access the sampleextension module directly from the Tcl SF CVS repository for the latest TEA standard (must newer than the above). You can also access the latest sampleextension CVS checkout at ftp://tcl.activestate.com/pub/tcl/nightly-cvs/

TEA Discussion Forum

TEA discussion takes place on the tcl-core mailing list.

TEA Summit

Scriptics hosted the TEA Summit, in Mountain View, CA, on March 15 & 16, 1999. At the summit, Scriptics and top developers from the community discussed plans for TEA.