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This mature middleware product has the calling of remote procedures.
One enduring problem of clientserver application development is cross-platform communications. There are several middleware packages that handle this task for you, removing much of the tedious programming tasks and offering a library of routines you use directly instead. NobleNet RPC (Remote Procedure Call) is one such middleware offering. NobleNet RPC (known as Rogue Wave's NobleNet RPC 3.5 since NobleNet was purchased by Rogue Wave) is designed to generate client-server C network code for you, reducing development time while offering your applications more flexibility and portability.
NobleNet RPC has been available for several years, and has added to the features of the system with each new release. The latest version was announced in December 1998, and adds several new features. To test NobleNet RPC, I used it to develop applications for a 20-node clientserver network covering four flavors of UNIX (AIX, HP-UX, SCO OpenServer, and Solaris) as well as Windows machines. Since NobleNet RPC can handle complex data structures, I concentrated on applications involving those structures as well as multithreading capabilities. Multithreading is one of the features of the new release that is claimed to increase performance and provide more reliability. I developed six applications ranging from database-query client tools to complex client-server calculations of cloud cover over major U.S. cities, each involving thousands of lines of code.
The NobleNet RPC package includes a single CD-ROM accompanied by a 400-page "User's Guide and Reference Guide." The manual is written for programmers and makes no attempt to teach either C, RPC in general, or the use of an addin library. The lack of an RPC explanation and basic tutorial may hinder some developers who are moving to RPC, as it is not an obvious programming task. NobleNet RPC suggests you learn from the online man pages, but that's a poor resource for most of us. Adapting your programming to use RPC can take some practice, although the process is not difficult once you become familiar with it. The NobleNet RPC manual gives some basic examples of modifying "Hello World" and simple data-transfer applications into a client-server model, but since there is no complex data exchange involved here, the examples are weak at best. It...