[sword-devel] Sword DLL's

[Chris Little]

> 	The new DLL is very different from the old one in approach.  The new
> DLL is a raw compile of the API into a DLL, whereas the old DLL was a
> compile of a 'procedural' wrapper on top of the C++ API, giving a flat
> API into the engine.

Troy & I tried to work with the DLL compiled by VC++ and it doesn't appear
to work very well because of STL in the library not being accessible from
new projects.  I'm not sure if this is an accurate assessment, since I'm not
a Visual C++ or DLL guru by any means.

I took the same files from the VC++ DLL project and put them into a console
application project and it does work.  There appear to be some bugs yet, but
Diatheke is compiling properly under VC++ and can retrieve verses. (Yay.)
If this works out properly, I will try building the library under VC++ as a
statically linkable library to see if that route could work for other C++
people.

> 	Not sure if the new one will help you in VB.  I would like
> to make an
> ActiveX component for VB developers, but don't have the knowledge or
> time.  I hope someone else might want to get involved and do this.

This is the next step.  I've built a couple of ActiveX controls for work, so
I will just expose the Diatheke functionality in a control (Troy's idea).
It will be far from a complete interface to Sword, but if we need more it
can be added later.  IMO,  if you want to do anything really heavy duty with
Sword, you should probably not use VB or Delphi, but go to a C++
environment.  That's not a slam against VB people, since that was among my
first languages.

--Chris