Can two applications communicate by UDP packets? - c++

Question

I'm looking for a way to ease the difficulty transferring data from one application/process to another, but should have some sort of error recovering capbility.
As UDP is an existing protocol that works well over network, I wonder if it can also be used by processes in the same OS(windows xp here) .
If yes can you provide some core code that illustrate this?

Answer 1

Read this http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/multipage/clientserver.html
listener.c
/*
** listener.c -- a datagram sockets "server" demo
*/
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <arpa/inet.h>
#include <netdb.h>
#define MYPORT "4950" // the port users will be connecting to
#define MAXBUFLEN 100
// get sockaddr, IPv4 or IPv6:
void *get_in_addr(struct sockaddr *sa)
{
if (sa->sa_family == AF_INET) {
return &(((struct sockaddr_in*)sa)->sin_addr);
}
return &(((struct sockaddr_in6*)sa)->sin6_addr);
}
int main(void)
{
int sockfd;
struct addrinfo hints, *servinfo, *p;
int rv;
int numbytes;
struct sockaddr_storage their_addr;
char buf[MAXBUFLEN];
socklen_t addr_len;
char s[INET6_ADDRSTRLEN];
memset(&hints, 0, sizeof hints);
hints.ai_family = AF_UNSPEC; // set to AF_INET to force IPv4
hints.ai_socktype = SOCK_DGRAM;
hints.ai_flags = AI_PASSIVE; // use my IP
if ((rv = getaddrinfo(NULL, MYPORT, &hints, &servinfo)) != 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "getaddrinfo: %s\n", gai_strerror(rv));
return 1;
}
// loop through all the results and bind to the first we can
for(p = servinfo; p != NULL; p = p->ai_next) {
if ((sockfd = socket(p->ai_family, p->ai_socktype,
p->ai_protocol)) == -1) {
perror("listener: socket");
continue;
}
if (bind(sockfd, p->ai_addr, p->ai_addrlen) == -1) {
close(sockfd);
perror("listener: bind");
continue;
}
break;
}
if (p == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "listener: failed to bind socket\n");
return 2;
}
freeaddrinfo(servinfo);
printf("listener: waiting to recvfrom...\n");
addr_len = sizeof their_addr;
if ((numbytes = recvfrom(sockfd, buf, MAXBUFLEN-1 , 0,
(struct sockaddr *)&their_addr, &addr_len)) == -1) {
perror("recvfrom");
exit(1);
}
printf("listener: got packet from %s\n",
inet_ntop(their_addr.ss_family,
get_in_addr((struct sockaddr *)&their_addr),
s, sizeof s));
printf("listener: packet is %d bytes long\n", numbytes);
buf[numbytes] = '\0';
printf("listener: packet contains \"%s\"\n", buf);
close(sockfd);
return 0;
}
talker.c
/*
** talker.c -- a datagram "client" demo
*/
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <arpa/inet.h>
#include <netdb.h>
#define SERVERPORT "4950" // the port users will be connecting to
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
int sockfd;
struct addrinfo hints, *servinfo, *p;
int rv;
int numbytes;
if (argc != 3) {
fprintf(stderr,"usage: talker hostname message\n");
exit(1);
}
memset(&hints, 0, sizeof hints);
hints.ai_family = AF_UNSPEC;
hints.ai_socktype = SOCK_DGRAM;
if ((rv = getaddrinfo(argv[1], SERVERPORT, &hints, &servinfo)) != 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "getaddrinfo: %s\n", gai_strerror(rv));
return 1;
}
// loop through all the results and make a socket
for(p = servinfo; p != NULL; p = p->ai_next) {
if ((sockfd = socket(p->ai_family, p->ai_socktype,
p->ai_protocol)) == -1) {
perror("talker: socket");
continue;
}
break;
}
if (p == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "talker: failed to bind socket\n");
return 2;
}
if ((numbytes = sendto(sockfd, argv[2], strlen(argv[2]), 0,
p->ai_addr, p->ai_addrlen)) == -1) {
perror("talker: sendto");
exit(1);
}
freeaddrinfo(servinfo);
printf("talker: sent %d bytes to %s\n", numbytes, argv[1]);
close(sockfd);
return 0;
}

Answer 2

You can, but for communication between two processes on the same host I'm sure there are better ways. I'm not a Windows guru unfortunately, but I'm sure there are some excellent local RPC frameworks you can use. UDP won't perform as well as a local socket solution, and you'll have to deal with (theoretically possible) packet loss etc. which is unnecessary.