ARexx <-> ActiveX Bridge

[amix]

I have asked Toni this a time ago in private email, so it may be pretty pointless to mention it another time. However, as I find the idea very intriguing, I thought, some of you may have interesting comments on it.

As you may know, Windows has its own scripting thing. It is marketed at admins mostly (and thus misplaced, since it can do much more) but neverless pretty interesting. ActiveScript, ActiveX or Windows ScriptHost (WSH). Basically it is a technology, that allows you to use your favorite language (as long as it has bindings for the Active stuff, as do VBScript, J(ava)Script, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl, OpenObjectRexx, and a few others) for scripting any script-host (which would be ARexx-Host in the Amiga world) and using COM objects (shared libraries) in these. While the technology may seem more advanced, the practical use is much more limited, due to the lack of support on application programmers side, the lack of vision on MS side and the lack of a GUI toolkit for ActiveScripting (I did not yet try wxPython, may be a possibility).

However, if you take a look at apps like Klient (www.klient.com) - an IRC client pretty damn close to AmIRC, I'd say - or editors like Zeus (www.zeusedit.com), WinAMP (with gen_activex installed), MediaMonkey, WMP, JR MediaCenter, SpeedCommander, GoogleDesktop and GoogleDesktopSearch, YahooWidgets, the whole MS Office stuff, IExplorer and others, some pretty interesting things could be done.

• Use the Amiga to develop stuff and have your editor save it via an ARexx macro. Depending on what you develop you could load the stuff on the Win side into a web-browser, run a make, use VCS not available on Amiga, etc.

• Execute anything on the Win side via ARexx calls on the Amiga side and vice versa (latter would need a message port on WinUAE being exposed as a COM object to Windows)

• Write a script to be used on Windows, that starts composing an email in YAM

• Select a file on the Windows side's file-manager and load it into an Amiga application.

• have Amiga data being displayed in a YahooWidget on your Win Desktop (how useless is that, ?)

• have the news:// protocol in a web-page point to an URI-protocol handler, that activates a WSH script and passes the URI to NewsRog (or what you may prefer) on the Amiga side

• etc. etc. etc.

This would be pretty useful for those, who insist, that the Amiga was a serious machine

Now if you take this and mix it with the Pubscreen open on Windows Desktop feature (that won't be implemented either , what could this mean ? Oh my good Lord !

P.S. Where is the Boingball smiley ?

[YoJoe!]

I have wanted this same feature forever.

[smoorke]

There is something partially like this to be found on aminet that allows starting windows programs from within the emulated enviroment but not the other way around.

[smoorke]

util/misc/winlaunch

[amix]

smoorke, this is very nice. Thanks for pointing this out. Still, as YoJoe! said, it's not quite the same (but much better than nothing).

Downloading.... ;-)

[Toni Wilen]

I am not interested, sorry for standard answer

[amix]

I know ;-) (We talked about it <45E32D55.4030807@winuae.net>)