Richard, I don't know about the rest of your questions, but at least
with AOLserver 3.x, if you wanted to provide Tcl access to a 3rd party
C library the
only way to do that was to write an AOLserver
module creating the new Tcl commands. Except for any possible
thread-safety issues in the 3rd party library, this isn't that hard.
I don't know where this AOLserver verisign module you mention is to be
found (it's not in AOLserver SourceForge CVS), but that's presumably
what it's for, and why it was designed the way you mention.
Now, AOLserver 4.0 supports the standard Tcl package
require functionality, and (most) Tcl packages can be used
exactly as-is. (The exceptions are currently packages which use
global variables and expect those variables to be nicely cleaned up
and reset to default states on http connection close, which AOLserver
currently doesn't do.)
I am not sure, but I believe that AOLserver 4.0 may also be able to
use Tcl packages which include C extensions in exactly the same way.
In which case, the Verisign module you're talking could perhaps now
bee coded as a Tcl extension package and used from both tclsh and
AOLserver 4.0. But all this AOLserver 4.0 stuff is relatively new, so
even if that works (and I'm not sure), you won't find many people
around here who have done things that way yet.
