Copyright 1997 by Emmanuel Frécon
WebShare allows a user to present a set of "slides" to several distant users. The controlling user will run a WebShare Server, while the distant users will run a WebShare Client. The set of slides is really a set of URLs, published somewhere on the World-Wide-Web, so that all users will be able to access them. Both the client and the server are able to control Netscape or Plume to visualize the content of the URLs. It is then up to the users to setup their local WWW browser in order to be able to access the different URLs.
The WebShare server and client are implemented in Tcl/Tk, and are aimed at being run together with some other conferencing tools over the Internet, such as vat, vic, wb, etc... These tools will control other part of the presentation, such as audio or video transmission. They will run on any UNIX workstation capable of running wish, the standard Tcl windowing script.
The WebShare server and client are copyrighted by Emmanuel Frécon (emmanuel@sics.se). See the LICENCE file for details.
To be able to run the server and client scripts, users should have a correctly setup binary called "wish4.2" in their path. This software has only been tested with Tcl 7.6 and Tk 4.2. It requires TCP communication support in Tcl/Tk and will therefore not work with Tcl 7.4/Tk 4.0.
In order to control Netscape, which is the default, users will need to have the "netscape-remote" binary in their path. The source code for "netscape-remote" is included with the distribution. It is also possible to use the "netscape" binary. Since, "netscape-remote" or "netscape" will be forked, it is preferable to use "netscape-remote" to reduce waiting time.
Before running a session users should start either "Netscape", either "Plume". The WebShare software will not start them, it will try to communicate with the browsers to make them show the required URLs.
The WebShare distribution can be found at this location.
Starting wwwshare_server.tcl and wwwshare_client.tcl with the option "-help" will hopefully bring up enough help.
The server can be started with a file name as argument. This file will be read to create the list of URLs to visualize during the session. The file should contain one URL per line. Commentary can be inserted by starting a line with ; or #. Empty lines will be ignored.