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IPC Sockets
Issue: 3.2 (November/December 2004)
Author: Didier Barbas
Author Bio: Didier has been a dilettante programmer and linguist for more than 20 years. Unusual for a Frenchman, he speaks 11 languages, including Korean and PowerPC machine-language.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 8,019
Starting Page Number: 46
Article Number: 3222
Resource File(s):
3222.zip Updated: 2013-03-11 19:07:58
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
One of the features introduced in RB 5.5 is the InterProcess Communication Socket, aka the IPC Socket. Originally a Unix feature, it is now also available on Windows, which makes it a good cross-platform solution. IPC sockets are also faster than normal sockets -- slightly on Unix systems and quite a bit on Windows, at least according to RS engineers. In this column, we will see how to put these sockets to good use: we will build a minimal GUI framework for Python scripts, using IPC sockets as the communication medium. While you may not, dear reader, care for Python -- just don't mention it to me -- the example developed here will still provide you with the basics necessary to write your own communication framework.
Objectives
We will build a communication framework ("physical" connection and vocabulary) between a REALbasic application (also named "the framework") and a foreign application (here in Python, just to show that IPCSocket is not restricted to RB apps), with the framework providing GUI services to the faceless application (the Python script).
I will demonstrate the interaction functionalities of IPC sockets, by providing on-demand creation of GUI objects and their actions, events, and properties.
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