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1. Introduction

This document describes the IrTcl information retrieval toolkit, which offers a high-level, client interface to the Z39.50 and SR protocols. The toolkit is based on the Tcl/Tk toolkit developed by Prof. John K. Ousterhout at the University of California [ref 1]. Tcl is a simple, somewhat shell-like, interpreted language. What makes Tcl attractive is that it also offers a C API, which makes extensions to the language possible. The most important Tcl extension is probably Tk -- A Motif look-and-feel interface to the X window system.

To interface the Z39.50/SR protocol IrTcl uses YAZ. YAZ offers two transport types: RFC1729/BER on TCP/IP and the mOSI protocol stack. However, the mOSI transport is only an option, and hence it is not needed unless you wish to communicate within an OSI environment. See [ref 2] for more information about the XTI/mOSI implementation.

IrTcl is usually build as a dynamic library (WIN32) or shared Object (Unix) which is dynamically loaded by using the Tcl's load command. However, IrTcl can be compiled as a traditional static library as well.


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