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Re: Interplatform (interprocess, interlanguage) communication

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On 2/3/2012 2:52 PM, Stefan Ram wrote:
>    »X« below is another language than Java, for example,
>    VBA, C#, or C.
>
>    When an X process and a Java process have to exchange
>    information on the same computer, what possibilites are
>    there? The Java process should act as a client, sending
>    commands to the X process and also wants to read answers
>    from the X process. So, the X process is a kind of server.
>
>    My criteria are: reliability and it should not be extremely
>    slow (say exchanging a string should not take more than
>    about 10 ms). The main criterion is reliability.
>
>    »Reliability« means little risk of creating problems, little
>    risk of failure at run-time. (It might help when the client
>    [=Java process] can reset the communication to a known and
>    sane start state in case of problems detected at run-time.)
>
>    The host OS is Windows, but a portable solution won't hurt.
>
>    A list of possibilities I am aware of now:
>
>    Pipes
>
>    I have no experience with this. I heard one can establish
>    a new process »proc« with »exec« and then use
>
> BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new
>    OutputStreamWriter(proc.getOutputStream()));
> BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new
>    InputStreamReader(proc.getInputStream()));

That would require the client to start the server.

Does not look as a good solution.

>    Files
>
>    One process writes to the end of a file, the other reads
>    from the end of the file? - I never tried this, don't know
>    if it is guaranteed to work that one process can detect and
>    read, whether the other has just appended something to a file.
>
>    What if the processes run very long and the files get too
>    large? But OTOH this is very transparent, which makes it easy
>    to debug, since one can open the files and directly inspect
>    them, or even append commands manually with »copy con file«.

It should work, but it will be slow.

>    Sockets
>
>    This is slightly less transparent than files, but has the
>    advantage that it becomes very easy to have the two
>    processes running on different computers later, if this
>    should ever be required. Debugging should be possible
>    by a man-in-the-middle proxy that prints all information
>    it sees or by connecting to the server with a terminal.

That would be my choice.


>    JNI
>
>    JNI might be used to access code written in C or
>    ABI-compatible languages. This should be fast, but I heard
>    that it is error prone to write JNI code and needs some
>    learning (code less maintainable)?


JNI would mean single process.

It does fit with your problem description.

JNI is a bit tricky, but it is not more difficult than
many other things. But since Java programmers very rarely
use JNI, then most Java programmers never learn JNI properly
with the expected result. You could learn JNI if you need to.

Arne

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Re: Interplatform (interprocess, interlanguage) communication Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2012-02-03 17:50 -0500

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