Zugg Software :: View topic

Adept Joined: 01 Mar 2005 Posts: 277

Zugg,

Can zApp reference non-ActiveX DLL's (regular DLL's)? I am looking at two alternative languages for creating my DLLs. I wanted it fast and compact (and cheap to purchase) and these look interesting. My intention is using it for unique functionality and eLicensing for my zApp applications. I am looking at IBasic and PureBasic. They are so close to C that it might be argued that I might as well program my DLLs in C but I was looking for something a little more interesting than C (I love new products Laughing

,) and I was hoping for something that had more functionality built-in. Unfortunately, neither of them create ActiveX DLLs yet.

-Steven

Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2005 7:55 am

Not really. zApp can only use COM objects. So, if you create a DLL that contains COM objects, then yes, zApp can access them. However, if you are talking about calling some sort of raw DLL API routines, then no, there is no way for zApp to do that.

Calling raw APIs is *very* complicated. COM objects handle all of that complexity and deal with passing compatible data types, memory management, etc. For example, many API routines require you to pass a pointer...you can't do that in zApp. There is no way to get pointers from the scripts. Scripts all use variant objects and COM data types. While it might be theoretically possible to do this, I'm not sure it is within the scope of zApp at this point. Maybe some distant date in the future I'll figure it out, but I think it would take away a lot of the architecture benefits that zApp has right now. You'd end up with something in zApp that was like programming in C, with all of the problems and side effects.

Anyway, look for something that can create COM objects. That's really the more modern and clean way to develop DLLs.