AW: Squeak and COM

Torsten.Bergmann at phaidros.com Torsten.Bergmann at phaidros.com
Wed Jun 23 08:32:42 UTC 1999


>Has anyone implemented any COM capabilities into Squeak? Is anyone
thinking
>about this? Any work-in-progress? 

My company is working with SmalltalkMT (http://www.objectconnect.com)
to use COM functiality. I's very impressive how easily we can handle
the complexity of COM with Smalltalk as a more natural language. 
It's very easy to create COM Servers, ActiveX Controls, 
Automation Clienst/Servers, ...
And the resulting executable is fast and small as his C++ counterpart. 

The Win32 Source of the Squeak VM has defined some functions for
COM to use DirectX (see sqWin32DirectX.c). But it's work in progress
of Andreas. I don't think it is very hard to bridge to COM by wrapping 
the COM library (Ole32.dll) and use COM in Squeak like SmalltalkMT does.

But you get too platform dependent. You need EntireX on other platforms
to use COM. And you have the problem of Garbage Collection, because in
COM
you have to manage the lifetime of components by yourself (AddRef(),
Release()).

But at this time COM is the best way to deal with components. It's
language independent.
JavaBeans/EJB is limited to Java . CORBA is not really a component model
(it deals with objects). But it's interesting because of the powerfull
facilities.
We need the language independence and power of COM, the facilities of
CORBA and
the platform independence of Java. Maybe Squeak will be the right
platform
but we have to do a lot for this. We need exchangable components in
Squeak 
which are independent from implementation. Mixing code by loading
different 
change sets wont be the right way.

Torsten





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