Remote Procedure Call

• Slides as PDF File
• Slides as Online Presentation

• Sun's online manual on "old-style" Remote Procedure Calls (inluding rpcgen, XDR, etc.)
  
• A simple RPC example, sending a message to a remote machine and have it printed on the console on that remote machine. The example comes from the above online manual, including instructions on how to compile and run the example on a machine that has rpcgen and all other Sun tools.... The same manual also has a more complex example, using XDR to convert and pass on complex, user-defined data structures.
  
• msg.x and the files that are generated automatically from it: msg.h, msg_clnt.c, and msg_svc.c
  
• rprintmsg.c
• msg_proc.c
  
• The set of commands to compile the complete application:
• $ rpcgen msg.x
• $ cc rprintmsg.c msg_clnt.c -o rprintmsg -lnsl
• $ cc msg_proc.c msg_svc.c -o msg_server -lnsl
• Two good general-purpose overview websites for XML-based RPC are http://www.xmlrpc.com and http://xmlrpc-c.sourceforge.net/ (the latter contains software to program/use XML-based RPCs in C and C++).
  
• Java has support for (nearly) all technologies we will talk about in class. However, the basic Java Platform (J2SE) supports only a subset of them (RMI and CORBA, for example). To experiment with the more advanced technologies (XML-based RPC, Web Services, etc.), you need to install either:
• The Java Web Services Developer Pack (besides obviously the basic Java environment, i.e. J2SE or similar). 
• Install Java 2 Enterprise Edition. The supported technologies that comprise the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, are specified here.
• Install GlassFish, an Open Source Java 2 Enterprise Edition Application Server