Chapter 10.  Need IPC? Get Your Minions to Work

In the previous chapter, you learned how to send information across threads of the same process. In this chapter, you will discover how to share data between threads of different processes. We will even share information between applications running on different physical computers. We will enhance the Mandelbrot generator application from Chapter 9, Keeping Your Sanity with Multithreading. The Mandelbrot application will now only display results processed by the worker programs. These minions have only one mission: compute the tasks as fast as possible and return a result to your main application.

Here are the topics covered in this chapter:

• How two applications can communicate together

• Creating a multithreaded TCP server

• Reading and writing on a TCP socket

• Other IPC techniques like QSharedMemory, QProcess, and Qt D-Bus

• Network serialization using QDataStream

• Computer clustering

• Inter-process communication techniques

An IPC (inter-process communication...