From: Charles Calvert Date: 2010-10-28T11:55:55+09:00 Subject: Re: Web App with Windows GUI On Wed, 27 Oct 2010 16:36:03 -0500, John W Higgins wrote in : >[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.] > >Afternoon > >On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 1:56 PM, Mike Stephens wrote: > >> Charles Calvert wrote in post #957599: >> > If the application that you >> > want to drive doesn't provide such an API, find one that does, or >> > write your own. >> >> Wow! I hope that was a good "wow". :) >> It's a vendor app. Thye can't provide web services for maybe a year. >> >> Pity - it seemed such a nice idea... I know. I thought the same thing when we finally realized that we were getting nowhere. >If you are still curious then you should start with this >http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml and see if AutoIt can manage >the application - if it cannot do so then you are really out of luck - if it >can - you have a huge hill but it would work in theory. That's an interesting suggestion. I suspect that you'll run into the same sorts of limitations, but you can probably do it a lot more quickly and cheaply. I do want to clarify one point about my earlier post. Obviously it's possible to script GUIs; people do it regularly and the existence of this product and others like it is a testament to that. They work reasonably well for simple tasks with a limited number of variables where there's some tolerance for failure. Automating software installations is one example. The problem comes in when you have to manage actual use of a more sophisticated application, track its state, input data, read output and deal with errors. The complexity skyrockets and the tolerance for failure decreases, particularly if you're farming it out as a web service or something similar. Mike, is there any chance that you could tell us what this application does? Someone may be able to suggest an alternative that you could automate directly from Ruby or indirectly via COM. -- Charles Calvert | Software Design/Development Celtic Wolf, Inc. | Project Management http://www.celticwolf.com/ | Technical Writing (703) 580-0210 | Research