Delphi for applications

From: Joris (PleaseReplyTo_at_TheGroupInstead.be)
Date: 01/24/04 

Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2004 12:57:21 +0100

Folks,

Following is intended as a very general question, collection ideas more then
straight specific facts.

I find VBA as a way to extend and customize applications very usefull. The
most usefull part of it is probably that that way, the straight UI oriented
using, the macro-recording stuff, and the programming-wise extending of
application is one straight line. Very powerfull. I mean that in contrast to
eg the 'actions' in Photoshop. There's no straight programming language
encoding of this flavor of 'macro', and thus, the bucket stops there.

But of course, I dislike VB itself, I'm a Delphi programmer.

So I'm wondering about your ideas to use this same concept with Delphi
instead of VB in our own Delphi applications. Like eg, if I would be coding
up a mail client in Delphi, I would be interested in that same straight
line, extending UI with macro recording and playing support, with macro's
being recorded as ObjectPascal, down to direct programmable extending and
customizing of the mail client and it's behaviour, by means of Delphi.

The only thing I thought of sofar is pretty straightforward, using ordinarry
Delph objects and stuff to access the mail client's data, exposing these in
ordinarry pre-compiled dcu's so that they can be used and linked in a DLL
that can be build with Delphi; and that can be next 'registered' as a
'plug-in' in the mail client. I could also generate such ObjectPascal code
from UI actions, thus supporting 'macro recording'. But this code next would
have to be compiled by Delphi and linked with the pre-compiled dcu's into a
DLL in order to dynamically load that DLL in the mail client and be able to
play the recorded macro. Not exactly straightforward nor a very short and
fast process.

I suppose what I'm missing out on with Delphi is an intepreter, and/or
Delphi-automation or such.

So I'm still in the stage of basic idea's, not very specific plans. I
thought this was the correct newsgroup to ask for ideas and opinions on
this. Please correct me if there's a better place to ask this question.

Joris

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