[futurebasic] Update on Navigation services

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From: David Blache <alterego@...>
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 21:41:21 -0600
On 9/23/98 10:08 AM, alterego@... wrote:

>>Would some FB faithful who have moved onto to MW (thinking of
>>David and Frank) be able to provide some dcoumentation here?
>
>I'll look into it when I get a chance.

So far, this is what i have found out:

The Navigation.o file in the universal interfaces was written and built 
by Apple.  As such, nobody has access to the code that generated these 
libraries except Apple.  It's highly unlikly (but possible none-the-less) 
that Apple would be willing to ive up proprietary source code of this 
kind to the general public.  But one of our engineers will be visiting 
Apple folks in the next couple weeks and said he would ask, on his own 
accord.  (great guy!)  :-)  The worst that will happen is they will say 
"no".

There are two possible ways as I see it to allow folks to use glue code 
libraries within FB:

1) Translate the glue _source code_ to FutureBASIC and compile an 
FB-compatible library from it. This depends on Apple being willing to 
hand over the source - which is, IMHO, unlikely, for various reasons.

2) Work out a standard method of calling these libraries with little or 
no modification from within FB code. This is not only possible - it has 
been done successfully - by Andy and I, back when I was doing extensive 
scripting work with FB^3.  Andy took AEObjectSupportLib.o, figured out 
which part of it was relevant, pasted that into a CODE resource, and then 
showed me how to call it using the CALL statement.  And it worked 
flawlessly.

I believe #2 is the way to go.  But I am unclear on the specifics of what 
Andy did, and what tricks will be needed to pull this off with other 
libraries.  But it looked pretty simple.  It was basically just a matter 
of a skillful copy and paste in Resorcerer, and a CALL statement in FB.

I am waiting to hear from Chris and Andy on this.  The benefits of giving 
FB'ers access to all of the glue-code libraries in universal interfaces 
are __enormous__.  I'd like to see a technote posted to Staz's website 
showing how to do it, what steps are involved, etc.  (Or I'd at least 
like to get the ball rolling in that direction.)   I'll even offer to 
write the technote if I can just get it in my head how to do the library 
conversion & calling.

Anyone for this, or am I alone?   ;)

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| David Blache          Software Developer / Technical Writer |
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