I want to reduce the CPU usage/ROM usage/RAM usage – generally, all system resources that my app uses – who doesn’t? 🙂
For this reason I want to split the preferences window from the rest of the application,
and let the preferences window to run as independent program.
The preferences program should write to a Property file(not a problem at all) and to send a “update signal” to the main program – which means it should call the update method (that i wrote) that found in the Main class.
How can I call the update method in the Main program from the preferences program?
To put it another way, is a way to build preferences window that take system resources just when the window appears?
Is this approach – of separating programs and let them talk to each other (somehow) – the right approach for speeding up my programs?
What you’re describing sounds like Premature Optimisation. If you’re writing something other than a toy application, it’s important to be confident that your optimisations are actually addressing a real problem. Is your program running slowly? If so, have you run it through a profiler or otherwise identified where the poor performance is happening?
If you have identified that what you want to do will address your performance issue, I suggest you look at running the components concurrently in different threads, not different processes. Then your components can avoid blocking each other, you will be able to take advantage of multi-core processors and you do not take on the complexity and performance overhead of inter-process communication over network sockets and the like.