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Interprocess Communication

What wxWindows has


What wxWindows has

Interprocess communication (IPC) has always been a tricky area, and the plethora of techniques on different platforms has not helped. Microsoft has laid down several standards for IPC under MS Windows, the most established (if long in the tooth) being Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). DDE is the basis for wxWindows's IPC capability: the same, simple, object-oriented interface is provided for a subset of DDE under both Windows on the PC, and under XView and Motif on UNIX. The UNIX version is implemented using sockets, and allows processes on the same or different machines to talk to each other.

The benefits of wxWindows's DDE package are twofold: much greater simplicity compared with raw DDE and UNIX sockets; and the considerable advantage of keeping to platform-independence even in this notoriously platform-dependent area. Currently only synchronous transactions are handled; a later version of wxWindows may support asynchronous transactions also.

A user-contributed package is available that replaces the wxWindows implementation of DDE with a WinSock implementation, to allow communication between Windows and UNIX. The API of that package is identical to the one described in this manual. The WinSock implementation will probably soon be incorporated into wxWindows.

See the overview of DDE for more detailed information.