Practical Unix Programming:
A Guide to Concurrency, Communication, and Multithreading
by Kay. A. Robbins and Steven Robbins
Chapter 14:
Remote Procedure Calls
Opinion is divided on the
remote procedure call (RPC): Is it the best
or worst development to hit distributed
computing. Unfortunately the user-interface
for RPCs is an emerging
standard which is not as simple as it should be.
In any case, this chapter discusses the basics of RPCs and
allows you to form your own opinion about their future.
The chapter illustrates, by example, the mechanics of
converting a local function to a remote service. The
discussion then turns to such critical issues as server state,
idempotent calls, and semantics under failures. Sun
NFS (Network File System) is an important commercial application
whose protocols illustrate many of these ideas. The chapter
closes with an explanation of how to develop a threaded server.
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