Inter-Process Communication (IPC) is a set of techniques for the exchange of data among two or more threads in one or more processes. Processes may be running on one or more computers connected by a network. IPC techniques are divided into methods for message passing, synchronization, shared memory, and remote procedure calls (RPC). The method of IPC used may vary based on the bandwidth and latency of communication between the threads, and the type of data being communicated.

IPC may also be referred to as inter-thread communication and inter-application communication.

IPC, on a par with the address space concept, is the foundation for address space independence/isolation.^[1]

Implementations

There are a number of APIs which may be used for IPC. A number of platform independent APIs include the following:

• Anonymous pipes and named pipes
• Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
• Freedesktop.org's D-Bus
• Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
• Message Bus (MBUS) (specified in RFC 3259)
• Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM)
• ONC RPC
• Sockets
• XML XML-RPC or SOAP
• TIPC
• ZeroC's Internet Communications Engine (ICE)

The following are platform or programming language specific APIs:

• Apple Computer's Apple events (previously known as Interapplication Communications (IAC)).
• KDE's Desktop Communications Protocol (DCOP)
• Libt2n for C++ under Linux only, handles complex objects and exceptions
• The Mach kernel's Mach Ports
• Microsoft's ActiveX, Component Object Model (COM), Microsoft Transaction Server (COM+), Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), anonymous pipes, named pipes, Local Procedure Call, Message loop, MSRPC, .NET Remoting and Windows Communication Foundation
• Novell's SPX
• POSIX mmap, message queues, semaphores, and Shared memory
• RISC OS's messages
• Solaris's Doors
• System V's message queues, semaphores, and shared memory
• Distributed Ruby
• DIPC Distributed Inter-Process Communication

Table of IPC Methods:

See also

• Computer network programming
• Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP paradigm)
• .NET Remoting
• Microkernel
• Nanokernel
• Protected procedure call

References

External links

• Linux System V IPC Main Page

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