dll ignorance

[Alex Rice]

On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 06:54  PM, Jim Lambert wrote:

> <a generic dll-glue stack>
>
> Like Python, Director has a glueDLL XTRA too. It would be handy to 
> have such
> a mechanism for Rev. On the other hand, it does go against the grain of
> cross-platform portability. There's always that tension, isn't there,
> between native capabilities and external platform-specific solutions?

Yep I guess it's a choice between idealism and getting the job done :-) 
It wouldn't make Revolution any *less* cross platform. It would open up 
new possibilities. I like Revolution's pragmatism for the stuff it 
embraces or will embrace like - print dialogs, ODBC, Aqua sheets, 
Quicktime, Win32 registry, formatForPrinting - which are all platform 
specific to some degree.

In my case
- deliverable is Win32 only
- a .dll exists, for the CLIPS expert system
- but I'm running shell() commands to get the functionality that's in 
the .dll
- my app would be faster and better if I could just use the .dll

It's not a showstopper, just a "wouldn't that be nice" kind thing.

I am looking at the source for the Python calldll module. It's not a 
lot of code, but it's replete with pointer voodoo and assembly code. 
blech! My C skills are not that good.

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com