WO2009046593A1

WO2009046593A1 - Application communication method for terminal

Info

Publication number: WO2009046593A1
Application number: PCT/CN2007/003763
Authority: WO
Inventors: Zemin Wang; Xin Yang; Fei Ju; Youpeng Gu
Original assignee: Zte Corporation
Priority date: 2007-10-12
Filing date: 2007-12-25
Publication date: 2009-04-16
Also published as: CN101141742B; CN101141742A

Abstract

An application communication method for a terminal is disclosed. The method includes: (1) the application needing application communicating registers a message channel in a terminal operation system, and assigns a message processing module of the application on the message channel; (2) message is sent to the message channel registered by the message, when another application sends the message to the application; (3) after the message channel receives the message, the message is transformed to the message processing module, and is processed to finish communication of terminal.

Description

Terminal application communication method

Technical field

The present invention relates to the field of terminal software, and in particular, to a method for application communication of a terminal.

Background technique

The mobile terminal device is an embedded software device. At the same time, it is different from the universal embedded device. It has good human-computer interaction, and satisfies the individual requirements of the functions, styles and usage habits of the human terminal; With the rapid development and use of mobile terminals, a mobile terminal is required to perform as many tasks as possible to facilitate people's work and life. Therefore, the mobile terminal device inevitably has multiple tasks and multiple processes in the internal embedded software implementation, and the efficiency of application communication between these multi-tasking and multi-process determines the performance of the mobile terminal to a large extent. Therefore, the clean and efficient application communication in the mobile terminal is a key issue in the development of mobile terminal software.

Application communication provides basic communication capabilities for communication between different applications, whether the application of these communications is within the same thread (or process) or between different threads (or processes). The most basic form of application communication is the IPC (InterProcess Communications Protocol) provided by the operating system. However, the IPC format provided by the operating system is too primitive and too simple. It is generally suitable only for writing lower-level software systems.

Therefore, in the development of mobile phones, it is inevitable to solve the defect that the IPC of the operating system itself is not easy to use and cannot be directly used. Most mobile phone developers have chosen to implement their own application communication on the operating system IPC, except for those transplants. Difficulties, reuse of application communication mechanisms and methods that require a lot of porting work on other mobile phones. At present, the most influential application communication methods in mobile phone development are Qt Cop (QCOP) communication protocol and open source in Trolltech QTOPIA software products. The message bus system D-Bus communication mechanism.

The QCop communication mechanism adopts the publish/subscrible mode, which makes the communication very scalable; it is used for communication between different clients within the same address space or between different processes. The originator of the message only needs to create a QCopEnvelope object containing the channel name, Message name, parameters, etc.; the recipient of the message must first create a message in order to receive the message.

The QCopChannel object, the channel that wants to receive the message, indicates the correspondence with the sender of the message; at the same time, relying on its internal function callback mechanism-signal-slot mechanism, the QCop communication mechanism solves the received message and The processing relationship for receiving messages. Therefore, for the Qcop communication mechanism, the communication participant only needs to know the message channel name of Qcop, and any sender can send any message to any receiver, which makes the communication have good flexibility and scalability. However, it should also be noted that the design of QCop communication mechanism is aimed at high-end smart phones, so it is not very suitable for low-end and mid-range mobile phones in terms of structural complexity and operation mechanism; at the same time, its object-oriented design ideas are transplanted to face There are certain difficulties in the design of the process, and the internal signal-slot mechanism introduces a high degree of internal coupling. For mobile application communication, the biggest drawback of the QCop communication mechanism is that it does not support synchronous transmission of messages, which brings developers. Additional development difficulty.

D-Bus application communication is a message bus system that provides a simple way to communicate between applications. The message bus is built on a common one-to-one message transmission framework.

Although the easiest way to process communication is one-to-one process communication, since D-BUS itself is bus-based. Therefore, D-BUS provides a daemon (also known as a message bus daemon) that routes messages on a particular bus, thus forming a bus topology that allows processes to be at the same time. To communicate with one or more applications, applications can send or listen to various events on the bus. It can be seen that compared with the QCop communication mechanism, although D-BUS supports the synchronous transmission of messages, its implementation mechanism is extremely complicated, and it is necessary to specifically start a background message bus server in the system, so it is more suitable for the application of high-end smartphone framework. Communication between.

In summary, QCop communication protocol and D-Bus application communication are huge in structure for medium and low-end mobile phones, and require a lot of mobile phone resources; for mobile phone development including high-end smart phones and low-end mobile phones. , it shows a problem that cannot be generalized. There are also problems that cannot be generalized on other high, medium and low-end terminals similar to the above-mentioned mobile terminal functions.

Summary of the invention

The present invention provides an application communication method for a terminal, so as to solve the problem that the application communication method existing in the prior art solution is not common in high, medium, and low-end terminals. In order to solve the above technical problem, the present invention provides an application communication method for a terminal, and the method includes the following steps:

(1) an application that needs to perform application communication registers a message channel in the terminal operating system, and attaches a message processing module of the application to the message channel;

(2) when another application transmits a message to the application, sending the message to a message channel registered by the application;

(3) After receiving the message, the message channel hands the message to the message processing module of the hanging party for processing, thereby completing application communication.

The above method further includes the following steps:

(4) When the application communication of the terminal is aborted, the message channel registered by the application is logged out. Further, in the method step (3), after the message channel receives the message, the message is handed over to the attached message processing module for processing according to the principle of first in first out.

Further, in the above method step (1), the message channel is identified by a message channel name string.

Further, in the method step (1), when registering the message channel, the application inter-process communication protocol of the terminal operating system is encapsulated to create an application communication message processing object, where the object includes a timely acquisition of the arrival message. The message channel of the signal and the message content and the message processing module processing the message of the channel, the application communication message processing object is hooked as a node in a global linked list, and the application communication message processing object Identified by the message channel name.

The foregoing step (1) attaches the message processing module to the message channel by: attaching a monitoring function for monitoring the application communication message processing object in the main loop of the application, and simultaneously processing the message processing module The corresponding callback function pointer is saved as an input parameter to the monitor function.

In the above step (2), when another application transmits a message to the application, the application finds a corresponding application communication message processing object in the global linked list by using the message channel name registered by the application, and then The message is directly written to the message channel of the application communication message processing object, thereby completing the transmission of the message. In the above method, when the application detects that a message is written on the message channel of the application communication message processing object in the main loop, the monitoring function is automatically invoked, and the monitoring function will read on the channel. The fetched message is handed over to the message processing module corresponding to the saved input parameter for processing.

Further, in the method step (2), the another application needs to provide the non-response sending and the responding sending of the sending message in combination with the requirement of the application communication of the terminal, and send and send the response to the message. The other application of the message uses a message channel to specifically process the response message.

The above application requiring application communication is a telephone service server, and the other application is a call application, or a short message application, or a phonebook application.

Compared with the prior art, the application communication of the present invention is performed in a channel-based manner, the sender sends a message to the channel, and the receiver obtains a message sent by the sender to the channel on the channel, and the message channel passes through the channel name string. At the same time, in the embedded software of the mobile terminal, the message dispatching function is implemented in the server daemon of the application communication processing of each application, thereby avoiding a background communication server dedicated to a common communication mechanism such as D-BUS; The shortcomings and imperfections of the current technical solutions can be avoided, and the application communication of the high, medium and low-end terminals can be realized simply and efficiently. .

1 is a flow chart of message channel registration according to an embodiment of the present invention;

2 is a flowchart of message sending processing according to an embodiment of the present invention;

3 is a flowchart of processing a received message according to an embodiment of the present invention;

4 is a schematic diagram of a message layer structure of a wireless application interface module;

FIG. 5 is a message flow diagram of a call application and a telephone service server according to an application example of the present invention; FIG. 6 is a schematic diagram of message processing of a telephone service server according to an application example of the present invention.

Preferred embodiment of the invention The technical solutions of the present invention are described in detail below in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and specific embodiments. In the application communication method of the terminal, the typical application terminal of the method is a mobile phone terminal.

An application communication method of a mobile phone terminal according to an embodiment of the present invention includes the following steps:

Step A: The application that needs to perform application communication registers a message channel in the mobile terminal operating system, and attaches the message processing module of the application to the message channel, so that after the message channel receives the message, the message processing is triggered. The module processes the message;

Step B, when another application sends a message to the application, the message is sent to the message channel registered by the application in step A;

Step C: After receiving the message, the message channel hands the message to the message processing module attached in step A for processing, thereby completing application communication of the two applications;

Step D: When the application communication is aborted, the context structure of the application communication is released, and the message channel registered by the application is cancelled.

The resources are released here, other applications will not send messages any more, even if they are sent, they will not be processed. If other applications still send messages, step D will not be executed. Therefore, if the message is sent, an alert will be sent. failure. Generally, step A is performed when the mobile phone is turned on, and step D is performed when the mobile phone is in the hand.

In step A, registering a message channel in the mobile terminal operating system needs to be implemented based on the underlying mechanism in the mobile phone system, such as an IPC of the operating system itself, such as a pipe, a socket, or a message queue. Encapsulation to create an object, called the application communication message processing object: GMsgHandler, which includes a message channel (registered in step A) that can acquire the signal and message content of the arrival message in time, and process the message of the channel. The message processing module attaches the application communication message processing object as a node in a global linked list (the reason why it needs to be saved in the global linked list is mainly because the specific application (at the time of registration) and the application main loop are required The list is operated; of course, there are many implementation methods. The global variable is to open up a shared memory for the specific application and the application main loop to operate, and the application communication message processing object is identified by the message channel name. Step A: attaching the message processing module to the message channel by: attaching a monitoring function for monitoring the object in a main loop of the application The number is used to call the GMsgHandler object after receiving the message arrival signal, and the callback function (also called the hook function) pointer corresponding to the message processing module is saved as an input parameter of the monitoring function. In this way, when the application detects that the object has data input in the main loop (the object gets a signal arrival message, that is, it knows that the message is received on the channel, there is data input), the monitoring function will be automatically called, and the monitoring is performed. The function will process the message read on this channel to the message processing module corresponding to the input parameter it holds.

In step B, it is required to provide a non-response transmission of the message and a response transmission in response to the demand for the application communication of the mobile phone (for example, after the voice call sends a dialing request to the telephone server, the telephone server session returns a call identifier to the voice call application), The response sends an asynchronous send similar to the message, after the message is sent to the message channel, the other steps can be continued, so it is easy to implement; and the response sends a synchronous send similar to the message, which is waiting for the message to be sent to the message channel. The application's message handler is executed until other steps can continue.

Considering that in the single-task framework of the low-end mobile phone, if the simple blocking mode will cause the system to die, in the application communication, a new channel is generally used to process the response message (in this case, repeat step 8). Step B, the process of step C), so as not to affect the operating efficiency of the system.

In step C, when the application detects that a message is written on the GMsgHandler object in the main loop, the hooked monitoring function is called to process the message.

As shown in FIG. 1, the message channel registration process in the embodiment of the present invention includes the following steps: Step 101: A message channel registration starts;

Step 102: The application that needs to perform application communication determines whether the channel is registered in the GMsgHandler global linked list: If yes, go to step 104; otherwise, continue;

Step 103: The mobile terminal application that needs to perform application communication registers the message channel and the corresponding processing function in the GMsgHandler linked list (this processing function is a function for processing the received message, that is, a function run by the message processing module);

Step 104, the message channel registration ends.

In the above message channel registration process, the message channel is identified by the channel name string, the message Channel names are unique across the system. The implementation of the message channel depends on the underlying IPC. For example, corresponding to the message queue mechanism, the message channel is a message queue, and the message channel name is the name of the message queue, which uniquely identifies the message queue.

As shown in FIG. 2, the message sending process of the embodiment of the present invention includes the following steps: Step 201: Sending a message begins;

Step 202: The application that sends the message determines whether the corresponding message channel name is empty: if yes, go to step 205; if no, continue;

Step 203: The application that sends the message determines whether the message channel is registered in the GMsgHandler list: if not, go to step 205; if yes, continue;

Step 204: Send a message on the corresponding message channel by using the underlying IPC, and the process ends; Step 205, the message fails to be sent.

Because the message channel name is unique within the entire system during the message channel registration process shown in Figure 1, in the above message sending process, the message is sent through the registered message channel name in the global linked list. The GMsgHandler object is then written directly to the channel of the GMsgHandler object to complete the message. For example, when the message channel name is the message queue name, writing the message to the channel of the GMsgHandler object copies the message to its corresponding message queue.

As shown in FIG. 3, the process of receiving a message processing in the embodiment of the present invention includes the following steps:

Step 301, the bottom layer IPC receives the message;

Step 302: Put the message into the corresponding message channel;

Step 303: The application detects the message in the main loop.

Step 304: Search for a processing function of the channel in the GMsgHandler linked list. Step 305: The message processing module executes the found processing function on the message.

The following is a specific example of the practical application of the present invention, considering that the mobile phone wireless application module is the same as above. Layer application interaction requires a large amount of application communication, so the following describes the application communication of the mobile phone wireless application interface module.

As shown in FIG. 4, the wireless application interface module has a message layer structure, and the wireless application interface module corresponds to the interface layer, the telephone service server, and the communication processing layer in the figure, and the telephone service server passes the communication processing module (such as an AT command (the AT command is The command that the modem Modem can recognize and execute)) interacts with the wireless module. The wireless application interface module is located between the mobile phone operating system and the application, and functions as a wireless application interface. The wireless application interface module mainly provides a wireless communication request sent by the receiving application, receives a command response sent from the wireless module, receives a notification message sent from the wireless module, ensures the real-time performance of the sending and receiving command, priority control of the command, and the command Parallel processing, exception handling of commands, wireless module data buffering, and establishment of data call link connections. The wireless application interface module communicates with the phone book application, short message application, call application, and the like.

As shown in FIG. 5, the message flow of the application application and the telephone service server of the application instance of the present invention includes the following steps:

Step 501: The application that needs to perform application communication registers a message channel in the operating system, and attaches the message processing module to the message channel.

To apply communication with the telephony service server, the call application needs to register a message channel in the operating system, such as the voice.service (described by string) channel, receive the message sent by the telephony service server, and attach the call to the hook. The processing function of the successful/failed message (such as making a call when the dialing is successful, and displaying the dialing failure to the user on the mobile phone interface when the dialing fails);

To receive messages from the calling application, the telephony service server also needs to register a message channel (as shown in Figure 6), such as the phone.server channel, which is attached to the processing function of the dialed message (the AT command that converts the dialing command into a response). Send to the Modem, apply the call ID of the call to the call, and respond to the call application with a dial success/failure message after receiving the response of the AT command.

At the same time, because the call application needs the telephone service server to respond to a call identifier, it needs to use the response message to send, so specially register a message channel syncmsghandler that specifically processes the response message, and attach the response function of the response message, here to the response message. Processing is The call identity and corresponding call context data are saved in the internal data structure.

Registering a message channel in the mobile terminal operating system requires an application communication message processing object

The message channel name and corresponding handler function are stored in the linked list structure of (GMsgHandler). As for the trigger of receiving the message, it can be triggered by such as polling or the underlying driver (here refers to triggering the underlying receiving, the underlying receiving can be detected in the main loop, the main loop is through the underlying event mechanism (such as having a message arrive) ) to drive). In this way, once a message arrives, the IPC will be triggered to receive the message. The message is dispatched (through the above monitoring function), and the corresponding processing function is searched in the linked list structure of the GMsgHandler according to the message channel name, and the processing function is called to run.

Among them, what needs to be explained is the sending and receiving of the response message. Due to the single-task framework for low-end and mid-range handsets, it is not possible to use a blocking response to avoid inefficient operation of the entire system. This problem can be solved by a special method of handling the message channel of the response message. This requires an additional registration of a message channel sync.msghandler. When a response message is sent, the name of the syncmsghandler channel is recorded in the sending message body. Once the message receiver resolves the message, the name of the syncmsghandler channel is not empty, indicating that the message sender If a response is required, the response message is sent through the sync.msghandler message channel; the normal response message (such as the AT command response in this example) is sent through the same voice.service message channel as the non-response message.

Step 502: The message is sent by searching the corresponding message channel in the GMsgHandler object list, and then sending it through the IPC of the operating system: the call application sends a response dialing message to the channel phone.server, and the phone service server is at the phone.server. Receiving the dialing message on the channel, after receiving the dialing message on the phone.server channel, the telephone service server will call the registered processing function of the call (as shown in FIG. 6);

Step 503: The telephone service server determines whether the syncmsghandler message channel is empty: if no, go to step 505; if yes, continue;

Step 504, the telephone service server sends an AT response message to the voice.service message channel, and proceeds to the subsequent process, and then proceeds to step 506;

Step 505: The telephone service server sends a response message to the syncmsghandler message channel, and performs a subsequent process. Step 506: When the call application communication is aborted, the message channel created in step 501 and the corresponding memory resource are deleted.

In the above step 504, the telephone service server sends an AT response message, and after the telephone service server receives the dialing message on the phone.server channel in step 502, the registered call processing function is called, and the two steps have no fixed time sequence. order.

INDUSTRIAL APPLICABILITY The present invention simplifies and conveniently implements application communication between a call application and a telephone service server, and effectively avoids the defect that the application communication method existing in the prior art solution is not common in high, medium, and low-end mobile phone terminals. It ensures fast and efficient porting of application communication in various mobile phones, thus shortening the development cycle and development cost of mobile phone software from one aspect.

Claims

Claim

An application communication method for a terminal, comprising the steps of:

(3) After receiving the message, the message channel hands the message to the attached message processing module for processing, thereby completing application communication.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the method further comprises the following steps: (4) When the application communication of the terminal is suspended, the message channel registered by the application is logged out.

3. The method according to claim 1, wherein in step (3), after receiving the message, the message channel hands the message to the attached message processing module according to a first in first out principle. Process it.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein in step (1), the message channel is identified by a message channel name string.

5. The method according to claim 1, wherein step (1), when registering the message channel, encapsulating an application inter-process communication protocol of the terminal operating system to create an application communication message processing object, The object includes the message channel capable of timely acquiring the signal of the arrival message and the message content, and the message processing module for processing the message of the channel, and attaching the application communication message processing object as a node to a global linked list And the application communication message processing object is identified by a message channel name.

The method of claim 5, wherein the step (1) attaches the message processing module to the message channel by: attaching a monitoring application to the main loop of the application The monitoring function of the communication message processing object, and the callback function pointer corresponding to the message processing module is saved as an input parameter of the monitoring function.

The method according to claim 6, wherein in step (2), when another application transmits a message to the application, the message channel name registered by the application through the application is in the The corresponding application communication message processing object is found in the global linked list, and then the message is directly written into the message channel of the application communication message processing object, thereby completing the sending of the message.

8. The method according to claim 7, wherein the monitoring function is automatically invoked when the application detects that a message is written on a message channel of the application communication message processing object in the main loop, and The monitoring function will process the message read on the channel to the message processing module corresponding to the input parameter it holds for processing.

The method according to claim 1, wherein in step (2), the another application needs to provide non-response sending and response sending of the sending message in combination with the requirement of application communication of the terminal, The message is sent in response, and the other application that sent the message uses a message channel to specifically process the response message.

The method according to any one of claims 1 to 9, wherein the application requiring application communication is a telephone service server, and the other application is a call application, or a short message application, or a phonebook application.