what is it called when a program talks with other programs or other computers

Question

Hi

As a true beginner, one often finds that the barrier to further knowledge is not knowing what to google.

I've made programs like pong and a sudoku solver, simple things. These days I would like to work on something more like tabslock or make a multiplayer pong, or at least start thinking about what that would involve.

So what exactly is it called when programs cause other programs to do this or that, or when a program talks with a copy of itself on another computer somewhere else in this vast internet.

z.

Answer 1

I expect that searching for server/client examples and socket programming in general will get you headed in the right direction.

For example, a google search for socket client server c will get you to An Introduction to Socket Programming.

A similar search for socket client server java gets you to a Lesson on Socket Communications

Answer 2

Network communication, TCP/IP communication, etc.

Try googling for "socket server examples in "

Answer 3

The current posts are good, also Remote Method Invocation (RMI) or Web Services, SOAP could also be useful. Also Remote Procedure Call (RPC), as in XML-RPC.

Answer 4

• sockets are logical slots in the OS for running programs (processes) to use for communication.
• protocols are languages, encodings, etc. that are agreed upon by both sides of such a communication, and are used to make sense of the data.
• remote procedure calling or RPC is when a process in one place causes another process in another place to run some code, as if one had just called a function on the other. This can be done over the network.
• XML-RPC and SOAP are two protocols for doing RPC over the web, for instance.

Answer 5

How about Peer-to-Peer networking, just using Sockets?

Answer 6

In a more general sense you may want to look up "Service-Oriented Architecture" (SOA) a service is a program, and a given service on 1 machine, can communicate with other services on other machines.

Answer 7

I think in a very general sense you're talking about Inter-Process Communication.

Answer 8

SkyNet or, if you prefer, Colossus/Guardian.