Printer and serial port

Hi,

I am evaluating Dolphin Smalltalk 5.1 professional for a project.
I need to access a printer to print reports and to develop a protocol to
communicate with remote equipments through a modem.
For the printer, I found the class PrinterCanvas, but I didn't found a class
for the serial port.
How is it possible to write to and read from a serial port ?

Thanks

Joseph Frippiat

> Hi,
>
> I am evaluating Dolphin Smalltalk 5.1 professional for a project.
> I need to access a printer to print reports and to develop a protocol to
> communicate with remote equipments through a modem.
> For the printer, I found the class PrinterCanvas, but I didn't found a
class
> for the serial port.
> How is it possible to write to and read from a serial port ?

I can't remember who wrote it, but there is a goodie floating around which
is a wrapper over the top of io.dll.

Google found it: http://www.smalltalking.net/Goodies/Dolphin/

Also, I there is a goodie by Ian Batholomew:

http://www.idb.me.uk/goodies5/serial.html

> Ian Batholomew:

oops, +r

Joseph,

> I am evaluating Dolphin Smalltalk 5.1 professional for a project.
> I need to access a printer to print reports and to develop a protocol to
> communicate with remote equipments through a modem.

I've investigated both of those areas and have goodies available.  I should
stress though that they (especially the serial one) should probably be
thought of more as a starting point rather than as fully fledged packages
that you can just "plug in and play".

The printing goodies adds extra functions to the Dolphin wrapper around the
Windows RichText common control.  You just create a document in a Dolphin
RichEdit, using different fonts and colours etc, and then tell it to print
itself.  The goodie also adds printing support to the basic Dolphin
environment, for example you can print out classes and methods.

Serial I/O is a bit different. Over the years I've played around with two
goodies that address this....

The first tried to be a "complete" package where I exposed as much of the
interface as I could and tried to provide Dolphin wrappers that enabled it
to be used in a OO way.  It worked, but wasn't particularly easy to use and
I haven't looked at it in years.

The second is just a simple interface that enables you to send/receive via
the COM ports and does little else.  However, it does provide a bit of a
framework that makes it easier to expand it and add extra functionality, DCB
and COMMTIMEOUTS structures for example.

The documentation for the packages is crap though :-(

My goodies are available on my web site (http://www.idb.me.uk) but I can
send you separate Printing/Serial packages to look at if you want to avoid
getting too involved with the other stuff that is included in the goodies
download.

--
Ian

Use the Reply-To address to contact me.
Mail sent to the From address is ignored.

Joseph,

> I am evaluating Dolphin Smalltalk 5.1 professional for a project.
> I need to access a printer to print reports and to develop a protocol to
> communicate with remote equipments through a modem.
> For the printer, I found the class PrinterCanvas, but I didn't found a class
> for the serial port.
> How is it possible to write to and read from a serial port ?

Look on Ian Bartholomew's web site.

Happy Smalltalking!

Bill


--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
[hidden email]