From: James Mills <jameswmills@...>
Date: 2007-02-08T00:07:37+09:00
Subject: Re: local interprocess communication ideas.

Thanks to everyone who had ideas on this one.  I love mailing lists.

I ended up using popen3 to launch the GUI from within the ruby code.
I created a listening thread on the stdout handle, and acted upon
anything that came in.  This has several advantages for this project.

* The GUI is really dumb.  All it does is generate a three-letter
message to stdout when a button is pressed or released.

* All of the prep code and routines needed to set up the serial port
comms and other prop data can be done before the GUI is launched.

* The GUI could be tested independently from the ruby portion.  This
was good since it was developed remotely.

In this scenario, popen3 was perfect!  It was really fast, and it is built in.

Thanks again!

~james