WAFE Tutorial Overview

WAFE stands for "Widget (Athena) Front End": It is a Tcl-driven X-based front-end package designed to be used by processes written in any programming language.

WAFE was written by Gustaf Neumann and Stefan Nusser, and is available from the canonical archive site http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/wafe/wafe.html as well as various mirror sites.

One WAFE advantage over Tcl/Tk is that WAFE allows use of any and all standard X widgets.

WAFE also has the advantage of segregating the various X widgets in a separate process, which in turn:

• Keeps the size of the main process down by not linking voluminous X widget code into it.
• Prevents widgets with long execution times from lagging the main process.
• Prevents pointer bugs or memory leaks in X widgets from corrupting the main process. (Or vice versa.)
• Makes it easy to close down and restart the X front end without shutting down the main process.
• Makes it easy to run multiple copies of the front end from a single process.
• Makes it easy to run the front end on a different machine than the main process, via network sockets.

Most of the example applications included in the WAFE distribution are written in Perl: It has the advantages of:

• Being complete enough to easily write small applications in.
• Having very good text handling facilities.
• Being free, reasonably fast, and quite concise.

All but the first of the examples presented in this tutorial are written in Perl: We presume a prior understanding of Perl.