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If a developer decides that an application would benefit from IPC, the developer must consider some of the following questions before deciding which of the available IPC methods to use.

• Should the application be able to communicate with other applications running on other computers on a network, or is it sufficient for the application to communicate only with applications on the local computer? In other words, does the application need to be networkable? Some IPC methods work either on the local computer or over a network; others work only on the local computer.

• Should the application be able to communicate with applications running on other computers that may be running under different operating systems (that is, MS-DOS®, Microsoft® Windows® Version 3.x, UNIX)? In other words, must the application be interoperable?

• Should the user of the application have to choose the other application(s) with which the application communicates, or can the application implicitly find its cooperating partners?

• Should the application communicate with many different applications in a general way, such as allowing cut and paste operations with any other application, or should its communications requirements be limited to a restricted set of interactions with specific other applications? Applications that communicate in a general way are called loosely coupled; applications that have a more strictly defined interaction are called tightly coupled.

• Is performance a critical aspect of the application? All IPC mechanisms include some amount of communications overhead.

• Should the application be a Windows-based application, or will character-mode functionalities be sufficient? Some IPC mechanisms discussed in this topic do not work in character-modeonly applications. The clipboard, dynamic data exchange (DDE), and object linking and embedding (OLE) all require that the application have at least one window.

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Dmitry Vasiliev (just.dmitry)

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