Interprocess Communication Using Message Passing
Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2006
Message passing is one of the most effective communication mechanisms between processes in a distributed network system. In this chapter we discussed the most commonly used message-passing based interprocess communication API for network programming — the socket API. TCP/IP networking software typically supports a number of different types of application programming interfaces (APIs) for communicating over a network. However, many operating systems adopt the socket API, which was originated as part of the BSD UNIX operating system. The socket interface provides an API for network communication that is very close to the API provided for doing ordinary I/O with local devices. In the chapter we mainly discussed the BSD Internet domain sockets. A number of issues, such as naming, types, and system calls about the BSD sockets were addressed. Two examples in C were also presented to demonstrate how to write socket programming.