The Client Communication Interface (CCI) is a mechanism built into the latest versions of NCSA Mosaic™ which allows other applications to communicate with Mosaic. For example, an application can use the CCI to ask Mosaic to access a World Wide Web document, download an Internet resource, or even send electronic mail.
In NCSA Mosaic™ for Microsoft Windows there are two different CCI interfaces. For local Windows programs running on the user's machine there is the OLE Automation interface. For remote programs running on some other machine (or perhaps the user's local machine) there is the TCP/IP CCI.
OLE Automation is a robust object-oriented way for your application to control and communicate with Mosaic. There are several ways to make use of OLE Automation. The easiest way way to use OLE Automation to access Mosaic is by using a product which has OLE Automation capabilities built in. One such application is Microsoft's Excel, which has a subset of Visual Basic built into it. There are many applications which provide OLE Automation control, Excel is just an easy example. If you're interested in writing stand-alone applications, the next choice would be to use Visual Basic 3.0, which has OLE Automation built in as well. Applications can also be written using Visual C++; however, this requires more extensive knowledge of the inner workings of OLE.
The other method for communication with Mosaic is through the TCP/IP CCI. The TCP/IP implementation requires some knowledge of socket programming, but provides a completely generic method for controlling NCSA Mosaic on any platform. (A library is being developed which will simplify programming of TCP/IP CCI applications.) The TCP/IP CCI is also the only way to control Mosaic from another computer.