I have a third-party product, a terminal emulator, which provides a DLL that can be linked to a C program to basically automate the driving of this product (send keystrokes, detect what's on the screen and so forth).
I want to drive it from a scripting language (I'm comfortable with Python and slightly less so with Perl) so that we don't have to compile and send out executables to our customers whenever there's a problem found.
We also want the customers to be able to write their own scripts using ours as baselines and they won't entertain the idea of writing and compiling C code.
What's a good way of getting Python/Perl to interface to a Windows DLL. My first thought was to write a server program and have a Python script communicate with it via TCP but there's got to be an easier solution.
For Python, you could compile an extension which links to the DLL, so that in Python you could just import it like a normal module. You could do this by hand, by using a library like Boost.Python, or by using a tool such as SWIG (which also supports Perl and other scripting languages) to generate a wrapper automatically.
How can I call a DLL from a scripting language?