ActiveX and RR

Mon Aug 9 20:15:18 EDT 2004

Basically, RR needs is own Dispatch Driver and IConnectionPoint external.  I would recomend however that RR developers implement a GetProcAddress and LoadLibrary fuctionality (cross-platform).  This will facilitate Win32 calls as well as glibc (CoCreateInsyance, CreateThread, CoMarshall, fork and many more) it would also increase the capibilities of the tool significantly.

NOTE: All COM and ActiveX interfaces are called via standard Win32 DLL.  Of course on *nix systems CORBA, PVM and many other libraries would finally be easily available.

Kevin

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 --- On Mon 08/09, Chipp Walters < chipp at chipp.com > wrote:
From: Chipp Walters [mailto: chipp at chipp.com]
To: use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:56:46 -0500
Subject: ActiveX and RR

Spent some talking with Chris today about ActiveX controls inside of RunRev. Some on the list here have posited the notion that RR can't be taken seriously as a tool until (among other things) it has ActiveX support. While this may indeed be true, it is worth examining what really *is* ActiveX support and how does a product like RB 'support' it? (Note: I expect this argument may also be true for Director, though I'm not positive. Perhaps Troy can shed some light). Regarding ActiveX (from Chris): 1) He believes it's easy to add (in fact, we have a ActiveX instantiator in our XConnector code for Hemingway) with the following caveats: a) You would need to know the CLSID of the ActiveX control you wanted to add (this could probably be done inside of RR using a Registry browser function). b) You could display the ActiveX control/player easily on a card c) You could set properties and call methods (assume you know the correct syntax) All this is well and good...and in fact is how RB deals with them. The two major hard parts are: 1) 'event trapping' or sending events back and forth across the RR boundary. 2) 'type marshalling' or converting RR strings to the appropriate Windows API type. The first can be done thru custom code in an external or an engine modification. Type marshalling is a bit more difficult and would make sense to have an engine modification in order to do this properly. Things like pointer handles and arrays are most difficult. This would mean we would need some way to convert strings to variants. Plus, there's the whole issue of unicode which makes things even harder... Chris' opinion is that RB provides a subset of ActiveX support and doesn't handle the 'events' completely-- and that is why they have their 'own' grids, tables, etc and don't use standard ActiveX ones (I assume the same is true for Director and 'Xtras'). It is also the reason why altBrowser is a custom external and not just an instantiatiated ActiveX wrapper. So, to recap, it appears it would be fairly easy to have an 'ActiveX' wrapper external which could call ActiveX DLLs. But, the DLL it calls would not actually 'trap' events, but rather only have props set and methods called. How functional is this? Well, for one it could work as a player for different 'players' like Flash, IE, Acrobat,Excel, as long as you don't need callbacks...which is of limited use because most programmers want to 'get' the event messaging. In fact, if one peruses the RB list, you will find instances of users being able to 'call' to the Windows Media Player and start playing a video. But, to able to respond to the video via callbacks, etc, is not supported. Interesting, in talking with Jerry Daniels and Chris about this, the very first question they had was "What do you want to do which isn't currently supported?" Ken Ray has offered some good suggestions regarding existing ActiveX tables, grids and treeLists. But, to my knowledge, adding the full functionality of these ActiveX controls are difficult (if not impossible) both in RB and RR (and I assume Director as well). Lastly, for those who have gotten this far:-) and think of ActiveX support a 'have2have' feature, I am wondering...How much would you consider paying for it? Or would you expect it to be in the 'Enterprise' version of RR? -Chipp _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution at lists.runrev.com http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution

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