About RIPC

RIPC is library providing interprocess synchronization and communication capabilities for processes running at different network nodes. RIPC provides wide set of standard primitives: semaphore, event, FIFO queue, barrier, shared memory, shared and exclusive locks.

Structure of RIPC package

RIPC package consists of two libraries:

ripcclient.lib
Provides stubs of RIPC primitives sending requests to the server
ripcserver.lib
Server implementation of RIPC primitives

RIPC supports local and remote sessions. Remote sessions created by RIPCClientFactory class establish connection with the server through TCP/IP stream socket. Server process should be started before clients. In this case primitives at local computer servers as stubs and redirect requests to the server. This mode is useful to provide synchronization and communication between several processes at the same or different computers.

Local sessions are created by RIPCServerFactory class. Them are useful to provide synchronization of threads within the same process (if you want to use more sophisticated synchronization primitives than standard synchronization facilities provided by OS). The single local session can be shared by all threads. No server process should be started in this case.

Quick start

Include files needed for use of RIPC package are located in inc directory. Libraries are located in lib directory. Version of RIPC for windows is provided with binaries of these librarier and server built by Visual C++ comiler. At all other system you will have to build these libraries yourself. Change directory to src and exceute make (for Visual C++ RIPC provides make.bat file which invokes MS nmake utility for makefile.mvc). By default static version of librarier are built. To produce dynamically linked librariers, edit makefile and assign set GENERATE_DLL=1. In case of using DLL libraries do not forget to include them in PATH (at Windows) or in LD_LIBRARY_PATH (at Unix). Server executable file will be placed in bin directory.

Server can be started by the following command:

     RIPCServer PORT
Here PORT is any free IP port at your system. Server is starts interactive dialog, allowing you the inspect current state of the server (info command) or terminate the server (exit command).

It is possible to run server in debug mode. Debug level can be specified using -debug option:

Default debug level is 1.

It is possible to start server in daemon mode, without interactive dialog. It can be done with -d option. For example, at Windows the following command: 

     RIPCServer -d 6000
will start server process in the background. To send commands to the server started in daemon mode you can use RIPCServerMonitor: 
   Usage: 
       RIPCServerMonitor HOSTNAME PORT [command]
   Commands:
       SHUTDOWN            shutdown server
       INFO                dump information about server status
If command is not specified in command line, server monitor starts interactive dialog. In this dialog, except SHTDOWN and INFO commands it also supports EXIT and HELP commands. EXIT command is used to close dialog, HELP shows list of available commands. Now it is possible to start client processes using RIPC library. Client should create RIPC sessions using RIPCClientFactory.create(char const* address, int port) method. Here address is address of the host where server is started and port is port listening by the server. Before exit client should close session. Below is example of using RIPC library: 
#inlcude "ripc.h"

void testRIPC(char const* hostname, int port) 
{
    RIPCFactory* factory = RIPCClientFactory::getInstance();
    RIPCSession* session = factory->create(host, port);

    RIPCMutex*   mutex = session->createMutex("my-mutex", false);
    mutex->lock();
    // do something
    mutex->unlock();

    delete session;
}

Distribution terms

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the Software), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OF THIS SOFTWARE BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

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