About Interprocess Communications

As computer users become more sophisticated, they demand more power from the applications they use. To meet this demand, developers add more features to their applications, and the applications become larger. These large applications can eventually become unmanageable, both from a development standpoint and from a user-interface point of view. Therefore, developers now tend to produce highly focused applications that do a good job on a limited number of features and then to enable those applications to communicate and share data with other specialized applications. No longer can any one application meet all user expectations; the age of cooperating and communicating applications has arrived.

Typically, cooperating and communicating applications can be categorized as clients or servers. A client is an application or a process that requests a service from some other process. A server is an application or a process that responds to a client request. Many applications act as both a client and a server, depending on the situation. For example, a word processing application might act as a client in requesting a summary table of manufacturing costs from a spreadsheet application acting as a server. The spreadsheet application, in turn, might act as a client in requesting the latest inventory levels from an automated inventory control application.