Skip Hill wrote:
<Snip>
1. Is it reasonable to expect that I can develop a reliable, effective and efficient TCP/IP socket communications driver written in ObjectScript and running as a job on the Cache server.
Well, InterSystems did with HTTP, FTP, and mail.
I actually got a (very simple proof of concept only!) working SNMP manager going last week.
As long as the protocol is at least byte(octet)-oriented, and you aren't
using Unicode, you can get around a lot of the bit manipulation stuff using integer math and $C functions and the _ string concatenation operator on the sending side, and $E and $A on the receiving side.
2. Or does it get complicated and cumbersome, requiring system boots to clear up problems with failed connections, timeouts, etc.
We have a low-volume application here using it for many months, I've had no problems.
3. What kinds of caveats or warnings might be appropriate to consider. For instance, maybe stopping/starting/monitoring these jobs is problematic, or for some reason they create unexpected resource demands, or it's fine with only one fixed client connecting to a socket, but it gets complicated with numerous multiple clients, or perhaps the packet mode works great but not the stream mode.
Well, my application wasn't job-oriented, was more the open a socket,
toss some bytes down the wire, wait for a fixed-length response string, close the socket sort of thing.
4. Is anyone aware of a "how to do it" sample that I might glean some direction from.
Sure, go to the ng archive at http://www.xiscsp.co.uk/ngp (thanks Peter) and "Search Bodies" for "socketnumber" (without the quotes), second item in thread. (Don't feel bad, I had a hard time finding it myself)
Hope that'll get you started, anyway.
Dave
