Re: Spawning a subprocess and communicating with it.

["Condic, Marin D." <condicma@PWFL.COM>]

Rick Stikkers <rstikkers@TELIS.ORG> writes:
>    As far as starting another program within your program, that is
>relatively easy.  Look up unix.exec and that should give you a pretty good
>start.  When it comes to communicating between these processes, things
>become a little more difficult.
>    The programs are going to have to talk back and forth on sockets.  As
>long as you just plan on talking between these two processes, it is
>relatively easy.  If you plan on adding more processes in the future,
>though, I would suggest writing a message router.  Socket communications
can
>either be done through C routines as we use at my company, or through use
of
>C pragmas.  Either way, you are going to have to rely heavily on C code.
>Although I am not allowed to release source code done for work, I did find
>some source that looks like it will work at
>http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/cen4010.S97/ada/sockets/gnatsocks/
>Good luck in this journey.  It is not an easy road.
>

Thanks for the info. I've bookmarked the page you site & will check it out.

I believe all I am going to need for my current application is the plain
vanilla case of one-to-one communication. Simple command/response protocol
where one process asks the other process for data and that process simply
returns it.

Are you sure it all has to be done with C routines? I'd think that most of
this should be simply connecting to OS runtime libraries, which may have an
interface expressed in C syntax, but ought to be accessible from anything.
Especially since Ada has such good syntax for connecting to stuff in other
languages.

MDC

Marin D. Condic
Real Time & Embedded Systems
Pratt & Whitney,
Government Engines & Space Propulsion
M/S 731-95, P.O.B. 109600,
West Palm Beach, FL, 33410-9600
Ph: 561.796.8997         Fx: 561.796.4669

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