science@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Mark Zimmermann) (02/20/91)
Some off-the-wall questions ... I would appreciate any advice or suggestions that anybody might offer ... I would like to have a process running in one Multifinder partition, and communicate with it from HyperCard -- how can I do this? Specifically, I am writing some free-text information retrieval programs (next generation after my "Free Text" C/HyperCard stacks) and want to have the search engine on the Mac act like the ones running under UNIX, in DOS, etc. My search engine responds to text input commands and returns the results of searches, in a fraction of a second. I would like to use HyperCard as a front end to that without having to rewrite all my code as an XFCN, if possible. Under UNIX, I can redirect stdin and stdout, so that the retrieval ugliness of a command-line interface is hidden (for instance, behind an Emacs shell, or whatever). How can I do this on the Mac? Will it be trivial under System 7, someday? Can HyperCard 2.0 launch another process and perhaps control some or all of its inputs and outputs? The only way I have thought of, so far, to do the job requires a complex and ugly-looking dance --- HyperCard would write out to disk (or to some common area of memory??) the information that it wants to pass to the other Multifinder-resident program (the search engine "browser"), and then post some sort of event or otherwise tell the "browser" process to wake up ... that process would then do its job, and leave the resulting data on disk (or in memory?) for HC to pick up and display to the user. How *should* I do this? Tnx for help! ^z (science@oasys.dt.navy.mil)