Lecture 2: Remote Procedure Calls

• Read/write vs. functional interfaces
• language-level vs. operating system construct
• Stub functions
• Client stub (proxy)
• Server skeleton
• Marshalling and unmarshalling (can also be spelled with one L)
• Serialization
• Pass by value, pass by reference
• Exactly once, at least once, at most once semantics
• Idempotent vs. non-idempotent function
• Interface Definition Language (IDL)
• RPC compiler (protocol compiler)
• Big/little/bi-endian byte ordering
• XML, JSON, Protocol buffers

ONC RPC

• IDL (Interface Definition Language)
• port mapper (rpcbind)
• versions
• early binding
• XDR: eXternal Data Representation
• Program number

DCE RPC

• UUID, uuidgen
• Cell, cell directory server
• multi-canonical data representation

COM+

• Surrogate process
• COM objects and Microsoft RPC
• Distributed garbage collection
• Remote reference counting
• Pinging (leasing)

Java RMI

• Object registry (rmiregistry)
• remote class
• serializable class
• distributed garbage collection

RPyC

• Symmetric operation
• Parameter passing
• proxy objects

Web services

• Site scraping
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Unassociated services
• Loosely coupled services
• Message-oriented communication

XML-RPC

• general concept

SOAP

• Web Services Description Language (WSDL)

REST

• PUT, GET, POST, DELETE HTTP operations