Re: Remote Procedure Call

[ncohen@watson.ibm.com (Norman H. Cohen)]

In article <3239BCF2.4EDD@sw-eng.falls-church.va.us>, Becca Norton
<nortonb@sw-eng.falls-church.va.us> writes on behalf of David Egli: 

|> Is the Ada 95 Remote Procedure Call based on any standard?
|> I have reference to a DRAFT ISO RPC standard and wonder if it was ever
|> finalized and whether or not it was the standard used for Ada 95's RPC.

As far as I know, little progress has been made on the draft ISO RPC over
the last two years.  Rather, de facto industry standards such as the Sun
(ONC) and OSF (DCE) implementations of RPC, predominate, with Java RMI
arriving any minute now.

The Ada-95 RPC is COMPATIBLE WITH the draft ISO standard, as well as with
other RPC variations.  The Distributed Systems Annex gives the
specification of a package System.RPC providing primitive facilities for
executing RPCs.  To conform to the Annex, an Ada-95 compiler must
generate calls on the subprograms provided by this package, but the
compiler itself is not required to come with a body for the package.
To actually use RPC, you must obtain an implementation of the package,
perhaps from the compiler vendor or perhaps from some third-party vendor.

The writers of the Annex were very much aware of the ISO draft, and
designed an interface for the package that is easily implemented on top
of a communications subsystem compliant with the draft.

--
Norman H. Cohen    ncohen@watson.ibm.com