thschulz@iraul1.ira.uka.de (Thomas Schulz) (06/13/88)
Apple announced a task-to-task communication mechanism for applications under MultiFinder with System Tools 7.0 -- Well, that sounds good but leaves some questions open: Will the MultiFinder include a scheduler which grants CPU-access to the tasks based on communication needs, priority etc.? Will applications be able to send events/messages/anything to other applications and then let the MultiFinder switch to this particular co-task? How will the communication protocol / language look like ? Clipboard usage as in Switcher ? AppleTalk ? TCP/IP ? Remote Procedure Calls ? Sockets ? Certainly we need a general mechanism which is transparent to communicating to tasks on the same CPU or via network to tasks (e.g. servers) on other machines (even non-Macs)- for that reason Apple should base this task-to-task comm. mechanism on available "standard" comm. protocols: AppleTalk, TCP/IP, RPCs. It would be the MultiFinders/Schedulers work to manage connections on the same Mac. Has Apple plans to develop the MacOS into a full multi-user, multi-task system ? We plan to have an application communicate with HyperCard; is doesn't make sense to include the application as XCMDS into HyperCard, nor does it perfectly make sense to have it running as a background-only application. Even if we would implement the latter, we would appreciate a clear communication mechanism between applications under MultiFinder. Does anybody else work on projects with communicating applications on the same Mac? Tom Schulz
jmunkki@santra.HUT.FI (Juri Munkki) (06/22/88)
In article <586@iraun1.ira.uka.de> thschulz@iraul1.ira.uka.de (Thomas Schulz) writes: >How will the communication protocol / language look like ? >Clipboard usage as in Switcher ? AppleTalk ? TCP/IP ? Remote >Procedure Calls ? Sockets ? _________ AppleTalk already works under MultiFinder. All you have to do is to temporary enable the "selfsend" flag using the call introduced in Inside Macintosh V. You can then use ATP or even DDP to communicate the data. If you use DDP, remember that A5 will not point to your globals. You have to store A5 so that you socket listener can find it. Otherwise DDP is better, since it reduces buffer copying. >Does anybody else work on projects with communicating >applications on the same Mac? I only had one Mac at home at the time I tried to learn to program AppleTalk. I tested my NBP and ATP knowledge by writing two programs that communicated using these protocols. Please note that it is still much easier to use two (preferably three) macs to learn appletalk. You have to call GetNextEvent to allow MultiFinder to juggle. Juri Munkki jmunkki@santra.hut.fi jmunkki@fingate.bitnet