Re: Communicate over TCP/IP

[Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com>]

2012/9/13 Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net>:
> On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 2:04 PM, Giovanni Campagna
> <scampa giovanni gmail com> wrote:
>> 2012/9/13 Baptiste Saleil <baptiste saleil gmail com>:
>>> Hi all.
>>>
>>> Just a simple question :
>>> I'm writing an extension for the shell.
>>> So, what's the best way to communicate over TCP/IP with this extension ?
>>
>> Have a look at Gio: http://library.gnome.org/devel/gio/unstable/
>> It includes GSocket, wrapping the low-level BSD sockets, and higher
>> level wrappers such as GSocketClient and GSocketConnection.
>> Once you have that, you can get a GSocketInputStream /
>> GSocketOutputStream, wrap it with a GDataInputStream /
>> GDataOutputStream for buffering and formatting.
>> If you're doing binary communications, you probably need to target
>> 3.6, as many operations did not support GBytes in 3.4.
>
> That's not quite true. We enable binary strings, and gjs had
> "byteArray" since forever.

Yes, but you need the right annotations for that to work. Looking at
what's in the latest unstable GIO:
- only the GBytes variants of GInputStream are introspectable, the
binary array versions are useless
- GPollableInputStream is useful only for the GSource (but you can't
get the parameters passed to the GSource function), nonblocking read
doesn't work
- g_buffered_input_stream_peek has annotations, but they're wrong,
because they require you to pass an array into which to write (and
then the results are discarded, because the array is an in parameter)

Plus byteArray is used only with GByteArray (so never really), and
binary arrays are arrays of doubles, so I'd recommend against using
them for big binary blobs.

Giovanni