There are several IT-system infrastructures out there, where interaction would be nice to have within Smalltalk. The most important is of course the old and easy one: the plain C-programs.
Other infrastructures are Java (interaction possible with JNIPort – not available under VA) and .NET/Mono. For Visualworks is a package available to interact with .NET.
Mono offers interfaces for embedding Mono in a plain C application. This is possible under all platforms, where Mono is available. I tried this under Windows and under Linux and early experiments showed, that this is possible.
| domain assembly wrapper domainName pathName argV | "A Console based application we developed using Mono and MonoDevelop" pathName := 'C:\\Users\\mf\\Documents\\Projects\\Testme\\Testme\\bin\\Debug\\Testme.exe'. domainName := 'System'. wrapper := MSKMonoInterface startWithSync. "Set the environment under Windows - where is Mono" wrapper setLibPathDir: 'C:\\Program Files\\Mono-2.10.8\\lib' pathEtc: 'C:\\Program Files\\Mono-2.10.8\\etc'. "Load default configuration" wrapper configParse: nil. "Initializes the JIT system" (domain := wrapper jitInit: domainName) isNull ifTrue: [^'Error: No Domain creation possible']. "Open the assembly, where we want to execute the main() method" (assembly := wrapper openAssemblyPath: pathName domain: domain) isNull ifTrue: [^'Error: No Assembly found!']. "Execution" argV := OSObjectPointer calloc: 1 itemType: OSStringZ. argV at: 0 put: pathName copyToOSMemory. wrapper jitExecMainIn: assembly domain: domain argc: 1 argv: argV. "That's it" wrapper jitCleanup: domain
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