yon%consl4.esg.dec.com@decwrl.dec.com (David Yon) (10/09/90)
Has anyone noticed the proliferation of compression program "shells" and "wrappers", as well has other programs which leverage the use of pkzip, lharc, arc, and so on? I've noticed that they all work by spawning off a copy of the desired compression program to do their actual work, while keeping the UI in Windows. The unfortunate part is that (at least on a '286) you have to wait for Windows to jump to DOS app, then back to Windows (including a full redraw of the screen), which can get tedious. I was thinking that "I can't wait until some of these guys include the compression code right in the Windows program!". This is of course impractical, and it all of a sudden occured to me that this may not be necessary... From taking a cursory glance through my SDK manuals, it appears that it would be possible to use DDE to implement a compression "server" program. This program would sit as an icon and accept requests for compression and decompression of files. Perhaps it would also have a UI to be run as a stand-alone program, but implementing a DDE-interface to the compression functionality would allow programs like ZIP-Manager, Click!, and perhaps even communications programs to leverage the compression algorithms without having to jump into real mode *and* without having to reinvent or license the code themselves. Seems like this could be used for other things as well. For example, instead of everyone in the world re-inventing ZMODEM, there could be a server which got handed some filenames and a port to use through DDE, which then could be shared by many different applications. So, what do you think? Am I missing something here? Should we all beat up Phil Katz to write PKZIP for Windows, and include a published DDE interface to it? David Yon CASE Consultant
aaron@jessica.stanford.edu (Aaron Wallace) (10/12/90)
In article <3108@ryn.esg.dec.com> yon%consl4.esg.dec.com@decwrl.dec.com (David Yon) writes: > >From taking a cursory glance through my SDK manuals, it appears >that it would be possible to use DDE to implement a compression >"server" program. This program would sit as an icon and accept >requests for compression and decompression of files. Perhaps >it would also have a UI to be run as a stand-alone program, but >implementing a DDE-interface to the compression functionality >would allow programs like ZIP-Manager, Click!, and perhaps even >communications programs to leverage the compression algorithms >without having to jump into real mode *and* without having to >reinvent or license the code themselves. Actually, there is a decompression routine that comes with Windows that is used in the Setup program--I wonder if this can be used as a "freebie" in a decompresser for Windows archives? ANyone know the format MS uses??? Aaron Wallace