From: Reid Wilkes (reidwilkes_at_hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Feb 01 2004 - 23:26:05 PST
This paper presents one of the early descriptions of what is today a very familiar technology - Remote Procedure Call (RPC). In a nutshell, RPC is a technology for building distributed systems. It is a model for how programs running on separate computers should communicate, and a specification for how those communications should take place. The model is that one program makes what appears to that program to be a normal procedure call. However, this procedure call is actually the initiation of a network conversation with a program running on another computer. To both the program making the call and the one receiving the call, the procedure call can appear perfectly normal and neither caller nor callee needs to know that the other is not running in the local process. The "magic" is in a proxy and stub system and an underlying RPC service running on each machine. One thing I was surprised to see reading the paper was that the implementation was sufficiently advanced to include an automatic proxy/stub generator. The paper describes in high-level terms the network protocol used to actually transmit the function call and subsequent return values between client and server. This paper is actually quite hard to write a review on because it doesn't seem like there's much to say about it. RPC is clearly a very integrated part of many modern computer systems. It is the foundation of Microsoft's DCOM, and has led to technologies such as CORBA and the SOAP/Web Services technologies which are all the rage today. The paper is well written and describes the system in a way which provides sufficient insight into the complexity of the issues without bogging down in the details. One interesting follow-up would be to know how similar the exact protocols and algorithms described in this paper are to the underlying implementation of DCOM (I just point this specific technology out because I am very familiar with it).
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