A Poor Man's Approach to String-Based Interfacing of C++ Objects

During the last year we built several solutions for opening our ET++ applications for internal and external scripting. The most annoying part to be coded manually was the code stubs that translate a string based request into the invocation of a member function. For this reason we built an ET++ specific solution that provides dispatchable member functions in an inexpensive, non-intrusive way. Our solution consists of an extension of the macro generated ET++ run time meta information. To make a member function dispatchable, a developer has to write one macro call. This generates a member function meta object providing information about arguments and a function that serves to invoke the respective member function. These two generated parts work in the context of the dynamic invocation framework, which embodies an architecture that can be customized for varying interfacing needs.