Client-server programming

We are using buffered client-server socket communication to talk between an IDL user program on a Linux machine and a C++ device control program on a Windows machine. On the server side, the C++ program sm_server.cpp implements this with the support of the C++ class sm_services.cpp. On the client side, the IDL program sm_client.pro does the job (this program is in turn called by programs like sm_gui.pro or sm_script.pro). We document here the basics of the communication.