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Chapter 6  Remote Tcl Interface

This chapter describes the remote Tcl interface, which allows a separate external Tcl program to interact with ECLiPSe in much the same fashion as the embedding Tcl interface (see chapter 5). Like the embedding interface, Tcl and ECLiPSe code communicates by sending and receiving streams of bytes via I/O queues (the ec_rpc mechanism is implemented on top of these queues). The interface can thus be used in similar fashion to the embedding interface, e.g. for the development of graphical user interfaces to an ECLiPSe application, with the difference that the ECLiPSe program is a separate program and not embedded into the Tcl program.

The main features of the interface are:

The remote interface thus offers more flexibility than an embedding interface in how the Tcl code can be connected to an ECLiPSe program. However, as the Tcl and ECLiPSe processes are not as tightly coupled as in an embedded interface, the speed of communications between the Tcl and ECLiPSe processes is likely to be slower.


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