What are automation objects ?

Automation objects follow a standardized protocol to expose functionality of your program to other pieces of software. Among the many clients of automation objects are :

• Delphi itself;
• VBscript or JavaScript in MS-Internet Explorer or MS-Internet Information Server;
• the VBA macro language in MS-Office applications;
• MS programming languages as Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Visual Foxpro;
• the new MS Dot Net platform;
• non Microsoft languages as Visual Objects and PowerBuilder;
• databases as Oracle.

These clients will access your automation objects through a COM-interface. I will describe step by step how to build these interfaces and how to work with these automation interfaces.