Re: IDL and external app in concurrent mode

[Craig Markwardt <craigmnet(at)cow.physics.wisc.edu>]

barban74@my-deja.com writes:

> Hi everybody,
> my name is Andrea Barbaresi and I work in the research center
> of Telecom Italia Group, here in Italy.
> 
> I read on "External Development Guide" that
> "IDL was not designed to be used in a threaded program" so
> I'd like to know if it's possible to accomplish, both in Windows
> and in Unix environment, a task like the one
> described below:
> 
> Use a C++ program to activate a IDL widget-app
> in a non-blocking way (by means of "IDL_RunTimeExec()"
> statement?); after this  call the program must be able to continue
> its execution and periodically give back the control to IDL to
> check if there are any messages from the GUI created by widget-app.

Hi Andrea--

I think your best bet is to use two separate programs with a means of
communication between them.  Under Unix this is best accomplished with
a pipe.  While it would be useful to use SPAWN, I'm not sure IDL is up
to the task since you probably want two-way communication.  Also, you
probably want non-blocking I/O.  Under Windows I'm sure there is some
similar IPC mechanism, but it's been a while.  It used to be DDE but
that's been superseded I think.

Good luck,
Craig

-- 
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Craig B. Markwardt, Ph.D.         EMAIL:    craigmnet@cow.physics.wisc.edu
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