Introduction
The magic bus is a unique means of exchanging data between separate processes, locally or remotely. It is a sophisticated, yet simple to use, reliable transport layer made available to all applications whatever their programming languages.
In order to communicate with each other, programs open a single connection with the magic bus. They never directly exchange data. They only send messages to the bus and they only receive messages from the bus. Different programs can dialog using just one common interface.
Programs can enter and leave the magic bus at will. They can send a request or a notification message to a particular program or broadcast a message to an entire group of programs. They can reply to a request with a message which will be automatically transmitted to the caller. Addressing or transmission errors are always reported by the bus. Reply time-outs are automatically signalled.
Communications with the magic bus are asynchronous so programs are never blocked. There is no limitation to the number of connected processes. The data packets can be of any size. Since the protocol of the magic bus is textual, the messages are easy to format in any programming language.
The magic bus consists of a demon process and a library of seven functions in C. Nothing more is needed to make applications communicate. A complete program in C documents how the library is used.
The magic bus is amazingly simple and small. The size of this manual is a testimony of how fast and easily you will be able to move your applications into the world of distributed software.
The magic bus is for free for all. The source code is public.
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