Communication between external softwares and standalone app from Appdesigner

Hello,

I am working on a standalone application project which actively needs to communicate with several external softwares. The case is that the external softwares output some kind of data and my standalone application reads and uses it.

I intuitively used files for communication like .ini files and text files which includes all the triggers and signals I need for invoking the processing on my standalone application, this worked smoothly. I later noticed that this is a recommended method for such case.

However, actively searching for files/directories in a never-ending loop has costs in terms of processing power and drawback of performance drops. Is there any other methods you could recommend for such use case?

I wonder whether it would be better to use a TCP/IP echo server where my external softwares generate trigger echos (which is possible) and my TCP client on MATLAB reads it and triggers the callback for processing. Do you think would it be efficient or is there more efficient ways to accomplish this task?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

[Aditya Srikar]

Using TCP/IP communication between external software and a standalone application is a real-time and efficient alternative to file-based communication. Implement this by starting a TCP/IP server in your standalone application, and establishing a TCP/IP client connection from your external software. Send trigger messages over the connection to a callback function in your MATLAB program to process them. TCP/IP communication can improve performance and reduce processing overhead.

[Ergin Sezgin]

Hello Aditya,

Thanks for your answer.

This was an old question and I resolved the issue by TCP/IP communication via tcpserver and tcpclient functions. Both methods work well but TCP/IP communication is more efficient. Let me accept your answer.

Regards.