[Microsoft]'s Component Object Model [http://www.microsoft.com/com/] ...
Wikipedia, as usual, has a valuable (if incomplete) article
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_object_model]
on the subject.

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''(COM: Some people associate [MS-DOS]-style serial-line devices with this.  
Information about that is on this page: [Serial Ports on Windows].)''

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[TclScript] also is COM-aware.


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[COMet] is a COM Explorer for Tcl.  
It's a [tcom] based application to discover and interactively program COM objects.

[COM Tree] is a different COM inspector.


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Many popular [Microsoft Windows] applications expose a COM automation [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/automat/htm_hh2/chap1_3r1q.asp] interface, 
which allows external programs to launch and control them.  
The starting point to an application's COM automation interface is through its 
programmatic identifier (ProgID).  
Here are a few example ProgID's, any of which might be used in, for instance, tcom with
    set application [::tcom::ref createobject $ProgID]


    Netscape.Network.1 [http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/communicator/OLE/ole2net.htm]
    FrontPage.Editor.Document
    Word.Document (note that WordPad is ''not'' a COM server)
    InternetExplorer.Application
    Excel.Application
    Excel.Application.8
    PDF.PdfCtrl.1
    Word.Application
    DSOleFile.PropertyReader


'''How do I find out which COM objects are available?'''

In this c.l.t. posting [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/43ff92721c6a8795/43788c04ad184e39?q=activex&rnum=7#43788c04ad184e39], [Chin Huang] provides the following code to search the Windows registry for available COM objects, and prints their ProgID:

 package require registry
 
 set classesRootKey "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\\CLSID"
 foreach clsid [registry keys $classesRootKey] {
     set clsidKey "$classesRootKey\\$clsid"
     set progIdSubKey [registry keys $clsidKey "VersionIndependentProgID"]
     if {[llength $progIdSubKey] > 0} {
         set progId [registry get "$clsidKey\\$progIdSubKey" ""]
         puts $progId
     }
 }


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[[Explain relation between COM and [WSH].]]

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Alex Martelli:  "COM-related technologies seem mostly pretty
good, except for the little detail that they're often huge,
rambling, and full of redundancies and pitfalls -- this goes
for the object model of WMI just as well as for those of MS
Office applications."


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One of the eternal puzzles of COM work is how to find the right constants.
Mark Hammond packaged up his insight on COM's constants into a module
[http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/docs/ActivePython/2.3/PyWin32/html/com/win32com/HTML/QuickStartClientCom.html#UsingComConstants]
executable in [Python] contexts.  
Presumably we could, given enough motivation, do the same for Tcl, 
or at least render the code into human-readable direction.

The section titled '''How to Obtain Built-In Constant Values for an Office Application''' on the page
[How one discovers the API for a COM-exporting application] explains how to do this using [tcom].

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[[Explain [PT]'s new "Structured Storage" stuff--important.  http://www.patthoyts.tk/index.html#tclstorage
Pat also has an "OLE Application automation" [http://www.patthoyts.tk/index.html#autonotepad] ]]

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At various times, [steveo], [stever], [CL], and others have worked on [DCOM].

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   * [COM Events]
   * [COM gateway extension]
   * [COM on! - a tiny web browser]
   * [COSH] ...
   * [OLE Object Viewer]
   * [optcl] ...
   * [TclBridge] allows [Tcl] to call COM objects and vice-versa.  Very powerful, lots of options.
   * [tcom], included in recent [ActiveTcl] releases, offers both client and server COM functionality.
   * [TWAPI COM support] describes [TWAPI]'s client side COM capabilities.










<<categories>> Glossary | Windows | COM