yyang@frame.UUCP (Yeong Yang) (10/03/89)
This is my first posting here, and I'd like to first commend NeXT on their
outstanding effort in putting out a very delicate system in such a short time. I've been doing development work on 1.0 for some time and it has proved to be
very stable.
I am currently working on a piece of code that needs to do network broadcasting.
Basically, I want processes over the net to communicate using a common communica
tion port.
Each process periodically broadcasts a message over the net.
All processes running must to listen to a common port to receive the message.
How can I create the common port and let every process know about it?
The appkit Listener class provides a way to register a port with the nmserver
using a string. Subsequently a process can use NXPortFromName() to get the port.
Supposedly, each process on the net can CheckIn using the same name
and broadcast using the port obtained from NXPortFromName().
However, the flaw in this method is that NXPortFromName() launches the
program if it is not already running. This is unworkable in my case.
Also, the appkit does not allow multiple processes to check in using the
same name on any one server.
Is there another way to get the port without launching the program?
What are the alternatives?
What functions are provided to access the nmserver? and where can
I find more documentation on the nmserver?
Also, what kind of broadcasting feature does mach (or NextStep) provide?
Does the mach function call, msg_send(), support broadcasting?
Any info or *info would be much appreciated. Thanks,
Yeong C. Yang
yyang@frame.com