Inter-Application Communication Made Easy

The ToolTalk service provides you with a complete set of functions for application integration. Using the functionality provided with the ToolTalk service, existing applications can be made to “speak” to each other.

The demonstration of the ToolTalk service is simple: while using a simple text editor, you can ask an interface for selecting font names to change the font displayed in the loaded file. The ToolTalk demo consists of two applications from X11R4:

• Xedit – a simple text editor for X

• Xfontsel – a point-and-click interface for selecting X11 font names

This chapter outlines the simple steps to modify these two applications so that they can inter-operate; Adding ToolTalk Code to the Demonstration Applications shows how the ToolTalk code is incorporated into the source code files.