Greetings & Comments

Parker Whittle (PWhittle@hst.com)
Thu, 19 Mar 1998 10:02:00 -0800

Greetings:

This is an introductory message. I'm new to the list.

I've been an Oberon fan for several years, though I have never really
developed anything serious with it. System 3 has been great fun to
tinker with. I'm evaluating BlackBox personally (not as part of any
company-sponsored initiative) for it's applicability in developing
components as we move our products from a three-tiered to a more
distributed architecture. We develop information systems for managed
care on a WinNT/95 platform.

I downloaded the education version, and discovered that the
Direct-to-COM compiler is not included, and that it is a good deal more
expensive than the commercial version of BlackBox. Put together, these
two pieces are significantly more expensive than the enterprise edition
Visual Studio suite (which includes Visual J++, MTC, SQLServer, Visual
Basic, Visual C++, and more).

There is no way that I can justify this to the bean counters here at
HST. This pricing strategy doesn't seem to be the best approach to
gaining mainstream acceptance for the BlackBox solution (especially with
the imminent arrival of COM+).

The documentation also mentions that one can create Windows DLLs. Since
there is a circular reference in the Linker documentation, I seem to be
unable to discover how to do this. If I could at least get this far,
then I could craft vtables in Component Pascal for my COM interfaces.

Any suggestions?

---------
Parker Whittle
Principal Engineer, Applied Research
Health Systems Technologies, Inc.
(206) 448-7004 x231