Hi, > Do you have any use case in mind to start working on?
As a professor at business school I have various use cases, like developing business web applications where you cannot do anything without DB access (e. g. Oracle, SQL Server), where COM & ADO could be used. Besides, I could present to the students various cases of middleware connectivity & integration, up to the REST API, along with the COM(+). I'm interested also in workflow/business processes that another Pharo group is working on, but that's a different story :-) And this would go together with the display of a true OO language and dev environment. As a researcher I'm using tools to grab, process, analyze and save the data in various forms and tools, where Pharo could be the middle man - the orchestrator. To do that on the most powerful level in Windows you need COM. To cut it short, my needs are not really complicated, since I need COM only to "command" other applications and to get some basic/elementary data back. For that, as I see, the PharoCOM prototype just needs additional data types (at least the most used ones) to properly marshall the property and method calls and arguments. Today I studied the world of VT_VARIANTs, VT_BYREFs, VT_BSTRs and other strange types in COM world :-) If anybody has a good e-book on this I'd be most grateful :-) >From all the responses today I see that our desires go further, like: - a possibility to generate wrapper classes as interfaces to outside servers (Vince, Esteban M.) - expose Pharo objects as COM objects (Pablo) - OLE/COM implementation on a real case (Cris) Pablo, I hope that these explanations are interesting to you. If we are going to develop the functionalities together, then you have to give me/us some directions and rules (github etc). And, patience please, Smalltalk is my like tenth language, and I'm just starting more seriously with it :-) For the development, is it preferable to use Pharo 8? Best wishes, Tomaz -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
