How do I connect two apps

Question

I am considering building an app in C++ that will be parsing text from the web and create some statistical results. These results I want to be fed in an external app in real time. The external app (to whose code I have no access, but can ask for a - paid - custom made addition) will then need some code to read and use these results.

I am wondering what would be the best way to interconnect the two apps, in terms of speed and ease of implementation. I am considering :

 disk I/O (slow) 

 a Windows service  

 a DLL  

 a web service  

 a web page

Perhaps I am missing a better solution ? Thank you.

Update : there is an additional need to know how long a data request may take at worst.

Answer 1

A windows service would be sensible but would still need to communicate with the other app, this is called IPC, approaches on windows are described here, Named Pipes are simple & flexible, File Mapping is powerfull.

An alternative would be to stick a database in the middle?

Answer 2

• Sockets?
• Shared Memory?
• RAM Disk?
• TCP/IP?
• Windows Messages?
• Command line arguments (of the other application)?

What methods does the other application have to support receiving data?

Answer 3

There are a number of IPC mechanisms to choose from from (sockets, shared memory, pipes, ...). I guess the "best choice" will depend to a large extend on how the other application is structured aka. how much your custom extension will cost you.

I don't know much of your environment but it might be worthwhile to have a look at boost.interprocess: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_43_0/doc/html/interprocess.html