Much Ado about Nothing – C++ Fills the Gap
Today I was working on loading up my new price injector with the instrument data from the vendor's system and was originally thinking that if they just made their database layer available to me via their supplied shared library, I'd be able to send the query, read the answer and be done. Alas, they don't allow that.
But what they do have is a stand-alone app that takes a file with a request in it and can generate a file with the output of the command. I was a little concerned about how it'd all glue together, but I shouldn't have been. C/C++ really does have just about everything you could ever ask for in a language, and interfacing with stand-alone apps is no exception.
I was able to build the command, execute it to a temp file that I then read after the command was done. It wasn't as clean as it could have been, but it really wasn't that bad either. Thank goodness that all I had to do was get a list of instrument data.
So in the end, my concerns about the clunky nature of this interaction was really much ado about nothing. C++ made it much smoother than I was afraid it was going to be. Then again, when we fill up disk space and the output file can't be written, I might be singing another tune. But that's for another day.