1. Introduction

This document describes the IrTcl information retrieval toolkit, which offers a high-level interface for the development of Z39.50 clients. The toolkit is based on the Tcl/Tk toolkit developed by Prof. John K. Ousterhout at the University of California [ref 1]. The core of Tcl is rather small but it offers a flexible C API for easy development of Tcl extensions. The most important Tcl extension is probably Tk -- A portale GUI for X/WIN32/MAC.

To interface the Z39.50 protocol IrTcl uses the YAZ toolkit.

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