FrontPanel in DLL form?

Jake,
This may be a completely inappropriate question - I don’t know enough about the details of the FrontPanel API and C++ to know for sure. So here goes:

 Is there any way you could provide the FrontPanel API in standard DLL form? The reason I ask is that my main rapid prototyping language is Liberty Basic (

) which can open and call functions from within external DLLs. I would really like to be able to use my new XEM with Liberty Basic if at all possible, and I can’t do it with the existing C++ library. Any ideas?

Thanks!

*Brian

Hi Brian-

It’s something I’m thinking about, but don’t have a solution yet. The trouble is that DLLs don’t handle C++ naming very well, so they do better with C. A COM object would be better, but that doesn’t port directly to Linux. I may try the COM idea and see how things go. I’ll keep you posted.

Cheers,
Jake

Jake,
Yah, that’s what I thought. Silly C++.

 If you do make a COM object, I won't be able to use it. Liberty Basic does not support accessing COM objects (yet). So I'm out.

 I guess you're just going to be forcing me to learn Python.  :D 

*Brian

Well, I still may do the DLL. I still don’t know quite yet.

Python is very popular, very powerful, and portable. I’m no Python expert, but combined with wxPython, it makes a pretty slick GUI platform.

Unfortunately, there are a myriad of programming languages. And for good reason – not every one is ideal for every situation.

Cheers,
Jake

wxPython is a nice cross-platform user interface environment.

I find it interesting that Python and not Java is used for cross-platform applications in the ‘specialized embedded hardware dongle’ space.

How about a Java API, or sufficient documentation to let us build one?

The Python API is created (somewhat) automatically from the C++ API using a nice tool called SWIG. SWIG also supports Java. I’ll see if I can set it up to run a Java version, but I can’t guarantee when it will happen.

I succeded into building a dll (wrapper I use for interfacing with LAbVIEW) using Visual Studio and the .lib you posted for it.
As my developers use Dev-C and aren’t able to link any of .libs you provided, I’m wondering about a versiond for Dev-C or any trick for linking the Visual Studio one.
Thanks
Michele

Hi Michele-

No particular trick really. To be honest, the solution to most of these (except the Python / Java implementation) is to build a DLL. That is something of a priority now, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I need to determine the best way to do that so that we support the widest range of applications. The choice of DLL style is not entirely obvious to me yet.

Jake

A preliminary Java API is available now. If you’re interested in taking it for a test drive, please send an email to [email protected].

It does not currently support pipes, but those should be coming directly.

Hi!

So what you said means that the .dll compiled in Visual Studio could be used in LabView as an interface?
I just ask it because I’m working on a project and would be very important for me.

Thank you.