No subject

for the FPC is putting in interfaces?  This is an essential feature for COM programming as well.

Another aspect of COM (or CORBA... another distributed architecture) is just how far do you want to make
things cross platform compatible.  On the Linux side of things COM supports is anemic at best.  A little
bit of work in the WINE project, and one very proprietary COM platform that runs under Linux (with a cost
of approximately $600 per "server" workstation.... not at all GPL'd) there aren't too many options.  CORBA
isn't that much better, but at least there is a GPL'd option for a CORBA orb.

The reason why COM is so important is that ActiveX, at least the current implementation by M$, is treated
almost as a wrapper around a current COM interface.  ActiveX controls are essentially a GUI interface to a
COM object.  Having spent the better part of the last two years doing nothing but writing COM servers and
clients, I can tell you that it is an arcane art that takes some paradyme shifts in your thinking before
actually implementing this stuff.  There are some tremendous benefits to developing a large programming
project in this manner, and it would be useful for it to be incorporated into Lazarus.  I'm just
suggesting that there is also quite a bit of underlying architecture that needs to be added as well.

BTW, much of the justification for implementing the registry in Windows in its current form was to handle
many of the tasks required to deal with the OLE, COM, and ActiveX interfaces, and some of the discussions
regarding the implementation of a Linux equivalent to the registry would be required as a foundation to
any effort to develop a GPL'd COM platform.  What I'm getting at is that putting in COM support into
Lazarus is similar to helping design a really cool automobile, and then suddenly discovering that you also
need to build the gas station, the oil refinery, and the oil derricks as well, not to mention the steel
foundries, coal mines, ect.  Now imagine that you are trying to get all of this going on another planet
like Mars.  As far as COM is concerned, Linux might as well be Mars.

--
Robert Scott Horning
Trans-Lux West
1651 North 1000 West
Logan, Utah  84321
Phone: (435) 716-8696
FAX: (435) 752-8513
E-mail:  roberth at ise-tlx.com