# Communication Middleware (mw::com) ## Overview `LoLa`/`mw::com`: A high-level communication middleware as a partial implementation of the Adaptive AUTOSAR Communication Management specification. Also known as `ara::com` (as this is the related namespace in AUTOSAR). ## General introduction `mw::com` and `LoLa` are **synonyms** right now. While the former just expresses the namespace (`mw::com` = middleware communication), the latter is a hint on its technical implementation/unique selling point (`LoLa` = Low Latency). Since `LoLa`/`mw::com` is our in-house implementation of the AUTOSAR standard, which – according to this standard – resides under `ara::com`, the namespace similarity (`mw::com` ↔ `ara::com`) is **intentional**. Low latency in our `mw::com` implementation is realized by basing our underlying `technical binding` on zero-copy shared-memory based communication. The notion of a `technical binding` also comes from the `ara::com` AUTOSAR standard: `ara::com` just defines a standardized user-level API and its behavior (which we generally follow with our `mw::com` implementation). **How** an implementation realizes the public API within its lower layers (`technical binding`) is completely up to it. It is even common, that implementations of the `ara::com` standard come up with several different `technical binding`s (e.g. one for local and one for network communication). ## Documentation for users If you are an adaptive application developer in the IPNEXT project, and you want to use `mw::com` to do local interprocess communication, you will find the user documentation here: LINK TODO. Documentation of `mw::com`s public API with usage examples can be found in `doc/user_facing_API_examples.md`. If you want to see an example app, which uses LoLa to establish shared-memory communication between a service and a client you can take a look at our macro benchmark app which resides in `performance_benchmarks/macro_benchmark`.