[Newbies] API: Control Squaek by Excel

[Ron Teitelbaum]

Hi Uwe,

There are a number of ways that you can use to communicate with either Excel
to Smalltalk or Smalltalk to Excel.  The issue is really out of the huge
number of options which one do you want to try?

The best thing to do is to decide which things are important to you.  Here
are some things to consider:

Will excel be talking to Smalltalk on the same machine?
Will excel need to retrieve a response (is the communication two-way)?
What are the performance requirements of your system?  Does the conversation
need to be sub-second or will minutes be ok?
Will there be more then one client talking to Smalltalk at the same time?
Is there a database involved between excel and Smalltalk (which could be the
source of your communication also)?

As an example of a really easy communication protocol you could simply
define a text structure (say xml and then you could use SAX or DOM... :).
Then on a Smalltalk instance you could have a separate process that polls
for a text file to appear and then reads in the contents.  Now all you have
to do is get excel to write a file into a location that Smalltalk can read,
which is easy to do. 

If you answer some of the questions maybe I can help more.

Happy coding!

Ron Teitelbaum
President / Principal Software Engineer
US Medical Record Specialists
Ron at USMedRec.com 


>From: Loew Uwe 
>Sent: Monday, July 03, 2006 5:30 AM
>Hello community,
 
>Is it possible, to call a method of a Squeak class by another windows
>programm, e.g. Excel, via an API interface?
 
>Thank you very much.
 
>Best regards
>Uwe Loew
>Testsystems