Chipp- Monday, August 9, 2004, 2:56:46 PM, you wrote:
CW> 1) 'event trapping' or sending events back and forth across the RR boundary. CW> 2) 'type marshalling' or converting RR strings to the appropriate CW> Windows API type. These are exactly the two sticky points in creating a generic library mechanism. It's not just ActiveX and not just (insert your own favorite OS here)-style calls, either. I think what is necessary here to deal with variable typing is something similar to the declaration methods in RB or C or java - something that signals the engine that when it comes across this external function it will need to pass a 32-bit integer or a string or whatever the function needs. Then we need generic routines to do the argument casting. I don't have a strong preference for the actual syntax of the declaration statement. I *can* say that I'm not wild about having any of the existing syntaxes tacked onto runrev, but I *am* used to using them, as are other developers, so it may be worth putting in something that feels comfortable to them. CW> Interesting, in talking with Jerry Daniels and Chris about this, the CW> very first question they had was "What do you want to do which isn't CW> currently supported?" Ken Ray has offered some good suggestions CW> regarding existing ActiveX tables, grids and treeLists. But, to my CW> knowledge, adding the full functionality of these ActiveX controls are CW> difficult (if not impossible) both in RB and RR (and I assume Director CW> as well). CW> Lastly, for those who have gotten this far:-) and think of ActiveX CW> support a 'have2have' feature, I am wondering...How much would you CW> consider paying for it? Or would you expect it to be in the 'Enterprise' CW> version of RR? ActiveX is a mixed bag. My understanding is that OLE was rather universally reviled by developers as being too arcane and hard to use, so Microsoft renamed it ActiveX and more or less forced developers to use it by dropping support for earlier technologies. That said, ActiveX at least has a fairly good and well-documented discovery process for the features it exposes. As I've mentioned before, I think the mechanism for getting out of the RR sandbox (not necessarily ActiveX here) is a necessity for drawing in existing developers, at least in the Windows world. As an example, if I'm working as part of a larger team and one group has developed a middleware library in C that I'm supposed to interact with, I've got a limited number of choices right now. I will probably end up spawning an external library of functions in C as a shim between the two. I can see the questions coming from project management now: why do we need an extra layer of complexity? and if we have to write this layer in C anyway, why do we need runrev in here? -- -Mark Wieder [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
