| Remote Procedure Call |
Article Index for Remote |
Website Links For Remote |
Information AboutRemote Procedure Call |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT REMOTE PROCEDURE CALL | |
| operating system technology | |
| inter-process communication | |
| distributed computing | |
| middleware | |
| application layer protocols | |
|
HISTORY AND ORIGINS The idea of RPC goes back at least as far as 1976, when it was described in RFC 707 . One of the first business uses of RPC was by Xerox under the name "Courier" in 1981. The first popular implementation of RPC on Unix was Sun's RPC (sometimes called ONC RPC ), which was used as the basis for NFS . Another early Unix implementation was the RPC mechanism in Apollo Computer 's Network Computing System (NCS), which after HP 's acquisition of Apollo later surfaced as DCE/RPC in the OSF 's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). A decade later Microsoft adopted DCE/RPC as the basis of their Microsoft RPC ( MSRPC ) mechanism, and implemented DCOM (and ActiveX ) atop it. Around the same time (mid-90's), Xerox PARC 's ILU , and the Object Management Group's CORBA , offered a similar but platform-neutral paradigm, also based on distributed objects with an inheritance mechanism. MESSAGE PASSING RPC is an easy and popular paradigm for implementing the Client-server model of Distributed Computing . An RPC is initiated by the caller (client) sending a request message to a remote system (the server) to execute a certain procedure using arguments supplied. A result message is returned to the caller. There are many variations and subtleties in various implementations, resulting in a variety of different (incompatible) RPC protocols. Standard contact mechanisms In order to allow servers to be accessed by differing clients, a number of standardized RPC systems have been created. Most of these use an Interface Description Language (IDL) to allow various platforms to call the RPC. RPC analogues found elsewhere
WEB SERVICES RPC Web Service s were another attempt to standardize RPC between platforms by piggybacking on the near-universally deployed HTTP protocol. Using Web services a .NET client running on a Windows client can call a remote procedure implemented in Java on a Unix server (and vice versa). Web services use XML as the IDL, and HTTP as the Network Protocol . The advantage of this system is simplicity and standardization; both XML and HTTP are widely implemented standards.
SEE ALSO |
|
|