My company make automation machines (with a PC inside and a custom built software to control it).So, for the purpose of this question, we can say that these are normal PCs.Sometimes we have the need to link together 2 or more Machines/PCs and make those exchange data. Those are connected via ethernet, and make a local network.The data that we need to send/receive are simple informations like number of good and defective pieces , current state of the machine and so on.This is needed because these machines need to rely on each other to make the entire process working.Actually we solve this problem by using simple files.For example, when the machine A finishes the first step of his work write to a file on machine B. Machine B every N seconds read this file. When machine B notice a change (a particular word on the file) start his work and then write back to the file (in the meantime machine A is reading the file every N seconds) and so on..To me this approach seems wrong and i will prefer something like thrift or a rest service to make the machine communicates.What are the caveats of our approach from a technical view, and what advantages we eventually will have with other solutions?
File based communication vs Rest or RPC
design patterns;file systems;networks