From: Dave Burt <dave@...>
Date: 2005-09-27T16:56:42+09:00
Subject: Re: General programming strategy


"James Britt" <james_b@neurogami.com> wrote in message 
news:43386378.5030009@neurogami.com...
> Yannick Turgeon wrote:
>>
>> What I'd like, it's to change things and use Ruby to do some work. A
>> kind of programming interface between MS-Access and SQL-Server to
>> remove complex parts for VBA and use Ruby instead. I cannot rebuild
>> this big application from scratch (200+ forms, 200+ queries, 200+
>> tables, 100+ reports) so I have to live with some important constaints.
>>
>>
>> Can I use ruby to do a part of the job, a kind of dll or, even better,
>> a way that would keep state between different call?
>>
>
> Yes, I'm sure there are a couple of ways to do this.
>
>> Any suggestion would be appreciated.
>
> Here's one:
>
> I believe VBA can make HTTP calls using Microsoft's XmlHttpRequest object. 
> (I can't actually test this right now, because my machine has no 
> VBA-capable applications that I'm aware of.  Not sure if plain old 
> VBScript behaves the same; VBA seems to float between VBScript and actual 
> Visual Basic.)

Yes, you can do this with the WinHTTP library in either of these language 
environments.

> If this is the case, then you can write a Ruby app server that runs under 
> WEBrick...

As an alternative to this, you can attach a Ruby script to the running 
Access application using WIN32OLE - I think that might be easier. That would 
allow you to essentially add functionality to your application in Ruby 
instead of VBA.

Cheers,
Dave