Program Linking

[Richard Gaskin]

James Beckmann asks:

> Is Revolution capable of program linking,  is there a "answer program"
> command, that works on Macs.  Obviously wouldn't between PC and Mac as they
> don't like each other.

The OSes get along fine.  It's Bill and Steve who don't like each other. ;)

If you're linking between two custom apps built with Rev you can use TCP
sockets.  They're platform-independent, simpler to work with than Apple
events, and arguably more flexible.

If you need your app to communicate with another Mac app using AE
specifically, you can probably do just about anything you'd need with either
Rev's built-in support for 'dosc' ("do script", for commands) and 'eval'
("evaluate", for functions) Apple events, or with AppleScript.

Other programmers have told me that the "answer program" API is screwy under
OS 9, which may be why it's not more widely supported.  I don't recall
seeing it in anything but SuperCard, HyperCard, and an old stats graphing
program called Spyglass many years ago, and if there's a newer app that
provides this I'd be interesting in learning about it.  In the absence of
"answer program", does "tell <programname>" in AS do what you need?

As for any Windows equivalent to AE/AS, I'm afraid MS' fickle nature has
caught up with them:  somewhere between telling everyone to implement DDE
and then rescinding that in favor of COM which was then deprecated to
whatever else and now seems to be supplanted with VBS, the Wintel platform
does not seem to have a single consistent method for inter-process
communication (someone please tell me this is wrong).  DDE seems to be what
MS themselves have relied on most, even long after they told everyone else
to back away from it, but the XP specs make the deprecation of DDE explicit.

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Custom Software and Web Development for All Major Platforms
 Developer of WebMerge 1.9: Publish any Database on Any Site
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