Inside Macintosh: Networking With Open Transport / Part 1 - Open Transport Essentials

Chapter 5 - Programming With Open Transport

This chapter examines methods of structuring Open Transport programs and discusses the relative merits of these methods in the context of the Mac OS cooperative multitasking environment. The chapter also takes a closer look at Mac OS interrupt levels and explains how Open Transport processing is affected by interactions between code executing at these levels. You should read this chapter if you are writing a server application, encountering synchronization problems, or want to improve performance. The chapter "Programming With Open Transport Reference" includes detailed information about the functions introduced in this chapter.

To use this chapter, you need to be familiar with system tasks, deferred tasks, and interrupts in general. For additional information about system tasks, read the information about the SystemTask function in the chapter "Event Manager" in Inside Macintosh: Macintosh Toolbox Essentials, and for additional information about interrupts and deferred tasks, read the chapters "Introduction to Processes and Tasks" and "Deferred Task Manager" in Inside Macintosh: Processes.

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Chapter Contents

Open Transport Programming Models

Using Synchronous Processing With Threads

Polling for Events

Using Asynchronous Processing With a Notifier

Interrupt-Safe Functions

Memory Management From Notifiers

Interrupt Levels and Open Transport Processing

Hardware Interrupt Level

Deferred Task Level

System Task Level

Using Timer Tasks

Using System and Deferred Tasks

Calling Open Transport Functions

Scheduling Tasks

Deallocating Resources

Handling Synchronization Problems

Handling Multiple Simultaneous Connections

Problems With Accepting Multiple Simultaneous Connections

Using "tilisten" to Accept Multiple Simultaneous Connections

Improving Performance

Streamlining Endpoint Creation

Handling Dead Clients

Shutting Down Servers