Monday, September 24, 2007

Getting your COM objects to run on a shared web server

It turns out to be possible to run COM objects without registering them with regsvr32 or COM+ thingy. Furthermore, this is how we operate our online demos here :-) (of course, we plan moving to a dedicated one ASAP 'cause some are real heavy, especially DeepAnalyzer). Clarion developers: these are pure Clarion COMs.


The secret is to use so-caled side-by-side execution (SxS) which has been around since Windows 2000 (or XP) in ASP.NET environment (yet another reason to migrate to ASP.NET). ASP.NET 1.1 had this activation model as a default; ASP.NET 2.0 had it removed, but there is a workaround: a free (for now!) 3rd party library by MazeComputer taking advantage of ASP.NET "HTTP modules".


A few gotchas:


  • If you have a separate TLB (not linked inside the DLL), don't rely on MS Studio manifests. Build them yourself. Attached is an example of a working manifest.

  • Do not use AspCompat=true directive on that page. Even though it is recommended with COM objects, AspManifests does not work with it. Their support told me it's because the "performance boosters" create disarray between threads (in fact, AspCompat is supposed to limit everything to just one thread (IIRC) - strange).

  • Probably because of some kind of threading issue with the same library, you need not only to release the memory (myObj = Nothing), but also call the garbage collector to collect the garbage (GC.Collect()) after each disposal. Otherwise, you might get crashes here and there.
All the rest works like a Swiss chronometer. Feel free to ask questions if anything is not clear.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Digital Sonata releases Carabao Language Kit 1.0.0.0

Digital Sonata is proud to announce the release of Carabao Language Kit 1.0.0.


Carabao is a family of linguistic tools providing the following capabilities:


  • Sense disambiguation & text understanding

  • Detailed, sentence by sentence domain extraction

  • Machine readability evaluation

  • Automatic translation between languages

  • Deep morphological analysis and synthesis

  • Transliteration between scripts

  • Named entity recognition and classification

  • Automatic linguistic profiling

  • Universal measure conversion
The most distinctive feature of Carabao is the engine's complete abstraction - from the linguistic point of view. All the linguistic logic resides in a database complete with a powerful GUI data editor. This enables users to tweak, modify, alter the engine (to the point of adding a new language) in every possible way without writing one line of source code.

In addition to more straightforward purposes, Carabao can be integrated with 3rd party machine translation and other NLP packages (such as OCR or even voice recognition) to improve their accuracy.