ixtools Documentation

current-ready-b1014-r28564

SYNOPSIS:

ix-tools is a api written in plain C providing an abstraction layer for

• Events
• Event Sets
• Timer
• Inter Process Communication
• Message Queues (application internal)
• Filedescriptor activity
• Shared Memory
• Table key-data-mapping
• Sockets
• List
• Threads
• Critical Sections
• Signals
• Queued Input
• Semaphore
• Conditions
• Logging functionality
• Buffer object
• Toggle endian
• Some misc utility functions

Author:

R. Huhmann

The structure of the API is influenced by QNX, MS-Windows and VMS system calls. It was designed as a service-API for VMS-System Wrapper functions.

GENERAL:

• ix-tools must be initialized by ix_init()
• ix-tools function and type names have the prefix ix_
• the macro names have the prefix IX_
• most of its api-structure follows an object-oriented approach
• functions with postfix _new allocate dynamically memory for objects and return a handle for the object (constructor)
• functions which manipulate the object require the object-handle
• functions with postfix _free deallocate the memory for the given object (destructor)
• the function header describes the usage (see below)
• functions are thematically grouped by the name of type the constructor returns (e.g. ix_list_, ix_event_, ix_timer_, ix_net_, ...)

ix-tools is designed as a utility tool for event-driven host and network distributed applications. An ix-application works with one dispatcher-thread which is most of the time waiting in one central select() system call. Due to timeout or file-descriptor activity other threads (e.g. the main application thread) are awakened by an event-listener model implemented with a pthread_cond_signal()/pthread_cond_wait() mechanism, see ix_evs_wait().

"Interprocess communication" uses an ip-based packet transfer, each ix-application works as an parallel-IP-server (the application accepts max. MAX_TCP_POOL client connections, not used TCP-connections are automatically closed after IX_CLIENT_TIMEOUT secs ) and has client functionality to send packets or events to an arbritary ix-server. Messages are queued in an internally defined queue, ix_init() returns the ID of an event which is triggered when something is to read from this queue with ix_receive()

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