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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Luke" data-source="post: 424515" data-attributes="member: 602">Sure Scott. TCP/IP is a pretty low level way of communicating, and there are about three different class wrappers available that will work from BCB.Basically, once you've made a connection to another machine (whatever compiler was used to create the app, or even whatever operating system its on), you can simply read and write blocks of bytes to one another.Reading and writing text makes it pretty easy to find any issues, and the main thing to watch out for is that there's no guarantee that the blocks of written data arrive in the same block structure at the other end. This generally applies to large byte blocks, that could arrive as multiple packets at the receiving end ("always" arrive, and in order, though).To give you an idea of how easy and universal tcp/ip communications is, I'll use an example very relevant to this thread.I initially used it to interrogate the on-line Jamis Buck NPC Generator in RPM. I essentially made a tcp/ip connection to the web server Jamis was using, and sent a text string (HTTP GET command) that would be expected from a browser. The result read back was a format expected by a browser (HTML page), and I just extracted the relevant data to import creatures into RPM.Jamis urged me to use his source code, but it didn't quite feel right about that, so I eventually just included his EXE with RPM, and support copy-and-paste to import from his generator. People loved it, because, although the copy-and-paste was slightly less automated, it did work well off-line.Also, I had to figure out how to tunnel out from behind firewalls, and create a "proxy server" configuration for RPM (much as you set up in your browser). This is an additional confusing pain for people. Also, the generator server was (very) occassionalyy off-line, and had an upgrade once, which meant I had to update the HTML extraction.All those sorts of things point to issues that the on-line tcp/ip concept will be faced with. Klintus' idea for accepting code modules onto your machine sounds cleaner from that perspective (you can control what you get and when you upgrade), but also has issues, which I've already mentioned.</blockquote>

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