Sharing memory between executables?

Question

I'm working on a set of three programs: one camera interface and two vision processing routines.  Currently, the camera interface runs independently of the two vision processing routines, and the images are simply passed through Labview's shared memory.  In other words, the interface just runs and creates an image with a known name, and the other two routines use the name to read in that image and make their own local copy to operate on.
However, eventually these programs need to be compiled to executables, where this method will no longer work.  The two programs need to remain separate, so I can't build them into the same executable.  They will both be run on the same computer, so I was wondering if there was another way to write to and read from the computer’s memory that will still work for Labview-built executables.

Answer 1

TCP should be a perfectly acceptable solution. It's a common interface for exchanging data between processes, even on the same machine. The code for sending data really isn't that complicated. Just take a look at some of the TCP shipping examples in LabVIEW.
You could use something like ActiveX if you're running Windows for interprocess communication between the LabVIEW-built exe's, but that would add a bit of overhead and complexity to the matter. Also, that would really only allow you to access a subset of VI Server methods, such as setting control values. Sending and receiving data wouldn't be all that quick.
Another alternative would be writing the data to a shared file, but that makes it hard to stream data continuously.
Jarrod S.
National Instruments