TxRx - Tool Command Language extension for RPC programming

TxRx is pronounced T.Rex because it's from the time when the SUN was young. T.Rex is still around to haunt us and is getting ready to take a big bite of the future!

Cristian Mata, Dept. of Computer Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook

Goal:

Provide a rapid development tool for client-server applications using Remote Procedure Calls (RFC 1831).

Manual pages:

Txrx command
Call interface
Call interface using portmapper services.

To Do List:

Project will be released publicly in the near future. Test suite runs without problems on Windows 95, SUN and SGI. Other platforms will be tested as well, at least HP, Linux and Power Mac.

Example applications (see also To Do List):

When a client-server program desires to call or provide a remote service it loads the protocol description file. Once loaded the protocol is translated into bytecode (a compressed representation). RPC calls/replies are executed using the specification given in the byte code.

Steps:

What is new:

The interpreted approach. The rationale comes from the fact that XDR routines generated by rpcgen(1) are in fact a translator for a user-defined language (the protocol itself). An interpreter will offer about the same performance. The goal of the project is to be a simple and usable extension for C and Tcl programmers.

The Tcl world already has several distributed programming environments. The drawback of these environments is they are not compatible with existing network services, thus it is hard to convince management to use Tcl in distributed applications. By following a standard and providing compatibility with existing applications TxRx removes this objection.

One question that might be asked about the project is: why implement the RPC protocol when enhanced systems (like CORBA) exist and are used. The answer is: they aren't as simple as RPC thus they require an extensive implementation effort.

A byte code example!