The Tcl/Tk Project

			     Ray Johnson
		    Sun Microsystems Laboratories

The Tcl/Tk project is focusing on several problems of interest to the
agent community.  These include the areas of mobility, security, and
agent-user interaction.  While we aren't doing work with "intelligent"
agents or agent architectures, we do feel that our work provides key
technologies needed to effectively obtain the vision of agents that so
we are all working towards.  In other words, we are working on some
of the low level technology that other agent research assume will one
day exist.

Tcl has long been a very portable language.  Most Tcl scripts can run
unmodified on any of the platforms that Tcl has been ported to.  Tcl's
interpreted nature makes mobility a straight forward problem.
However, we do not plan to implement transit in mid execution like 
Telescript's "go" command allows.  In fact, at this point we are
unconvinced that such a feature is even desirable.

Our security model is rather different than Telescript's of Java's
security models.  Those languages focus on the access control of
various objects in the system.  Our model, on the other hand, uses
multiple interpreters to provide a "padded-cell" for untrusted agents
to run in.  We believe that our model is easier to understand and to
prove safe.

Currently, we are working hard on what we call "safe-tk".  The goal
of Safe-Tk is to allow untrusted scripts to interact with the user
in a "safe" manner.  The types of attacks made possible by allowing
an agent to interact with the user are interesting and challenging
to curb.

The latest fruit of our labors is a Tcl/Tk Plug-in for Netscape's
Navigator.  In short the plug-in allows designers to add Tcl/Tk
scripts to their HTML pages much like adding Java Applets.  The
plug-in uses the above technologies to ensure that these untrusted
scripts do not launch attacks on the client.  We are very interested
in finding ways for people to use this plug-in for their own agent
systems.

Their are currently ten people with the Tcl/Tk project at Sun Labs.
However, I will be the only person attending this conference. Also,
I would be interested in showing a demonstration.