[PEAK] Problems with the tutorial

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:11 AM 1/26/04 -0600, Driver, David wrote:
>Does the list have any suggestions for books about building component based
>applications? The two I have read have been at such a high and abstract
>level of description as to be useless to me. I am primarily a VB/SQL server
>programmer and this style of programming is still foreign to me. Thanks!

Hm.  It's hard to think of anything right off.  Although frankly, VB is 
pretty component-oriented in that most of the time you use components 
others have built, and just configure them with properties.

The main difference between that and PEAK is that you'll be more likely to 
have the equivalent of "Object" properties instead of value properties, 
where the object has to implement a particular interface.  Also, if you're 
familiar with the COM interface concept, you'll be pretty much at home with 
PEAK interfaces.  The main difference is that instead of 
IUnknown.QueryInterface(), there's the 'adapt()' function.  An object can 
implement '__conform__' in order to do the equivalent of 
IUnknown.QueryInterface() in COM, but you rarely have to because PEAK 
(really PyProtocols) interfaces can provide adapters on your behalf.

Of course, it's been nearly a decade since I've used VB or COM, so I don't 
know how much the landscape there might have changed since then.  I would 
guess the main difference, though, is that it's probably a lot easier to 
create COM components in VB today than it was back then.