LabVIEW helps you control your software system and present results through interactive front panels. These panels create a standard interface, regardless of your system hardware. You also have numerous options for data management, such as storing data to disk, communicating with other applications using TCP/IP, dynamic data exchange (DDE), passing the data over a network, and sending the data to plotters and printers.

 Interapplication Communication

LabVIEWs networking capabilities allow you to pass data between LabVIEW and other applications through network protocols, such as Windows Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), TCP/IP, and UDP.

 DDE

Dynamic data exchange (DDE) is a protocol for exchanging data between Windows applications. Applications using DDE can actually send messages containing commands and data to each other. With DDE, you identify the application you want to talk to by referencing the name of a service and a topic. First find the names of the service and topic that you want to discuss, and then open a conversation using these two names to identify a server. With LabVIEW, you can create VIs that act as servers to exchange commands or data items.

Shared Libraries

Applications that use specialized mathematical analysis routines or custom-designed data acquisition hardware may need to access functions outside of Lab VIEW. You can use the LabVIEW Call Library Function to access functions available in a 16-bit Windows dynamic link library (DLL) on Windows 3.1, a 32-bit DLL on Windows NT and soon Windows 95, or a shared library on UNIX platforms. Shared libraries are extremely powerful tools, because you can use them to share code among many applications. By using LabVIEW to access shared libraries, you gain the capabilities of the thousands of functions available in third-party libraries.

TCP and UDP VIs

LabVIEW contains a set of TCP and UDP VIs that you can use to create client or server VIs. You can use the TCP/IP suite of protocols with LabVIEW on all platforms.