Ivy software bus 3.8.1 review

Ivy is a simple protocol and a set of open-source libraries and programs that allows applications to broadcast information through te

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 64K Developer: Yannick Jestin

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Ivy is a simple protocol and a set of open-source libraries and programs that allows applications to broadcast information through text messages, with a subscription mechanism based on regular expressions.

Ivy libraries are available in C, C++, Java and Perl, on Windows and Unix boxes and on Macs. Several Ivy utilities and hardware drivers are available too.

Ivy is currently used in research projects in the air traffic control and human-computer interaction research communities as well as in commercial products. It is also taught to CS students.

Ivy is a CENA product.

Here are some key features of "Ivy software bus":
Ivy is not based on a centralised server. Actually, Ivy is mostly a communication convention, implemented through a collection of libraries for various languages and platforms. The current version of the Ivy protocol is version 3, which has been stable for the last 3 years.
Language bindings are available in C (Unix and Windows), C++ (Mac, Unix, Windows), Java and Perl. There have been successful uses through the C library
Messages are formatted in text, and subscriptions are based on regular expressions. Plans to move to an XML-based subscription language are on their way.
From the programmer's point of view, Ivy is an information broadcasting channel. The main functions are:
connecting to a bus. Example: IvyInit (b, "192.126:2011")
sending a message. Example: IvySend (b, "HELLO %s", world)
binding a message pattern to a callback function. Example: IvyBind (b, "HELLO (.*)", cb)
the main loop. Example : IvyLoop ()
Subscriptions are managed on the emitter's side, which limits the actual network traffic.
Direct point-to-point messages are also available.
Ivy was designed by a research group in Human-Computer Interaction, with the goals of connecting applications written on different toolkits/languages/platforms (such as an OpenGL application on a SGI connected to a PerlTk application on a Linux box), while keeping it simple: no server to be lauched and supervised, a simplistic API, and a communication model compatible with classical event-based GUI progamming. We think we have somewhat reached our goal...

What's New in This Release:
This release mostly contains bugfixes and code cleanup.