Transport-independent remote procedure call

 

Developed by Sun Microsystems, remote procedure call (RPC) easily separates and distributes client applications from a server mechanism.

RPC includes a standard for data representation, called eXternal Data Representation (XDR), to enable more than one type of machine to access transmitted data. Transport-independent RPC (TI-RPC) is the latest version of RPC. It provides a method of separating the underlying protocol that is used at the network layer, providing a more seamless transition from one protocol to another. The only protocols that are currently available on the System i™ platform are TCP and UDP.

Developing distributed applications across a network is a seamless task when using RPC. The primary targets are applications that gravitate more toward distributing the user interface or data retrieval.

• Network selection APIs
  These APIs provide the means to choose the transport on which an application should run.

• Name-to-address translation APIs
  These APIs allow an application to obtain the address of a service or a specified host in a transport-independent manner.

• eXternal Data Representation (XDR) APIs
  These APIs allow RPC applications to handle arbitrary data structures, regardless of their different hosts' byte orders or structure layout conventions.

• Authentication APIs
  These APIs provide authentication to the TI-RPC applications.

• Transport-independent RPC (TI-RPC) APIs
  These APIs provide a distributed application development environment by isolating the application from any specific transport feature. This adds ease-of-use to the transports.

 

Parent topic:

Integrated file system