From: Chuck Reeves (creeves_at_windows.microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jan 28 2004 - 14:15:19 PST
The paper, "Implementing Remote Procedure Calls" was written by Birrell
and Nelson at Xerox in 1984. The document provides a high-level (block
diagram) description of a model for execution of procedures on remote
computers. Built for use in the Cedar project at Xerox, the model
described is clearly the foundation for how RPC works in many operating
systems and distributed component models (DCOM, CORBA) today.
Specifically, features such as user-stubs (proxies), the role of the
RPCRuntime, server-stubs, interfaces and types even parallel the
conceptual models supported in the distributed component models of
today.
The description of how the transport protocol managed session,
conversation and message identifiers was paticularly interesting.
Although, I thought the text glossed over some of the decisions they
made regarding state management and process affinity.
There was also no discussion of the types supported by this system. In
my experience this is one of the most difficult decisions in building
this kind of infrastructure. Did they simply assume a that a common
language (and serialization model) was used on both sides?
Chuck Reeves, creeves_at_microsoft.com
Microsoft | Windows | Directory Services
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