MS>  have you had any experience with DAPI? From the little I've

Lotus (who are using it for SmartSuite) are probably the only people on the
planet that have more experience than I do at this point -- I was talking
to one of the dapie developers yesterday,  and he said they have 100
outstanding APARS (bugs;  some a realy minor),  and 6 of them are mine --
the rest are from Lotus.

 MS> heard, DAPI sounds like simply a new name for MIRRORS.DLL, which never
 MS> did very well

Mirrors translated (16bit) Windows apis, messages and resources at run
time.  Dapie is for 32bit windows source code.  Many translations happen at
compile time (via the header files),  only real OS/2 resources are used
(they are converted before link time),  and any runtime translations (for
example,  the upside-down coordinate space) are handled by new features
built right in to OS/2 (pmwin.dll, pmgpi.dll) and even in the video device
drivers (some Blt's), so they are not really translations at all.

The guy who made the pmgpi changes actually made some normal Gpi calls
faster while he was in there.

 MS> occuring in that dll). There is a possibility I might be porting a win
 MS> 3.1 app to OS/2, and was wondering whether DAPI is worth looking at,
 MS> or whether I should stick with SMART.

You mean "DUMB" ?   If it is small,  sure -- a 100% os/2
app will probably be better.  If it is not small,  use dapie -- I quoted 5
months to port the app I am working on (and I expected many months to
transpire before I had an EXE that did much of anything) -- then dapie/dax
arrived and I had the (already 32bit win) source code running -- RUNNING --
in about 3 days;  the hardest part was switching to the new C compiler.

It stills needs a lot of work -- mostly distilling the dapie bugs out of
the large program into simple samples I can send the (most eager to get
them) dapie team, and I had to disable certain features to get the code to
run (printing, standard dialog hooks, multimedia) -- some of which are now
supported by a later version of DAPIE;  I am going back to visit them now.

SMART is still useful,  even though you don't use its "Source
Migration or Analysis" features.  The Resource Converter,  and
BMP/ICO/PTR converter work really well.

Also,  Smart's SLINK2 editor,  although awkward (hint, run through the
tutorial) can be _really_ handy for porting large bodies of code that you
didn't write.  It builds a database of all keywords in all source files,
and allows you to quickly access where a keyword is defined or used.  It
also uses this feature for multi-file,  multi-search & replace -- even
though this step too is awkward (you have to create a text file that
describes the search).


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