[java-gnome-hackers] LibUnique

[Andrew C. <an...@op...>]

I had a bit of fun yesterday and hacked up preliminary coverage for
LibUnique — something I've wanted to do for a while.

Some basic scenarios were easy to explore with unit tests and that's
where I started; it gets harder to test actual inter-process
communication [I didn't really want to fire off other Processes].

Meanwhile I did up a trivial example, and it works:

      * an initial instance figures out that it is indeed the first
      * a second instance can find out that another is running.
      * you can even send messages from a second instance to the unique
        one.

so I'd have to say it "works".

Branch is at
bzr://research.operationaldynamics.com/bzr/java-gnome/hackers/andrew/unique/

++

But it is easy to misuse, it seems.

Back to the unit tests, I tried to see how far I could push matters I
uncovered some strange crashes and/or hangs. So there may be limitations
like "once you've become a unique app you can't talk to other unique
apps" or "can't talk to yourself". Dunno.

The test that I couldn't make work is below. It probably encapsulates
several mistaken assumptions. I have a feeling that once a process is
bound to LibUnique under a given name, that's it, it cannot bind to
another.

It'd be nice to get some clarity here to clean up the docs - otherwise
it's too easy to misuse, and meanwhile it's a bit difficult to construct
a unit test about message payload passing.

AfC
Sydney