launching on Wintel/inter-process communication

[Richard Gaskin]

Ken Ray wrote:

>> But really far better would be to have the index app notified so it could
>> open the document within itself.  That preserves the user's state, keeps
>> only one intance to avoid confusing the user ("Why are there two index
>> windows?"), and is lighter on system resources.
> 
> 
> Richard, have you considered UDP? It is quite effective in Windows (although
> it is a little buggy on the Mac, but it should be resolved with 2.5 I hope).
> Basically one app opens a UDP socket that the other app communicates on.
> Works pretty nicely...

I generally like using sockets, but I tend to reserve their use for apps in
which I have reason to believe the system is set up for networking.  In this
case, the app is very consumer-oriented, and may be running on a machine
that hasn't even had PPP set up on it.

So unless there's a reliable way to use UDP or other socket method on a
machine with no IP, I may be back to polling.

Someone tell me: other than wasting 1 out of every 2000 milliseconds for the
majority of instances where polling a file comes up empty, are there other
ramifications with polling?   Aftr all, MS itself wastes several more clock
cycles keeping holes open in the OS.  ;)
  
-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
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 Developer of WebMerge 2.1: Publish any database on any site
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