Chapter 7 comments

The PowerPoint

End-to-End Data

Slide 3

Usually the term presentation formatting is applied to standards that are shared by several different servers. For example, XML or JSON would be a presentation format, but the messages exchanged by the SMTP mail server would not.

Slide 5

Java handles the marshalling of data by use of Serializable interfaces. In Python this is done with the pickle module. Of course, JavaScript uses JSON.

Slide 15

Usually, the programmer does not write the RPC stubs. They are generated automatically during the compilation process.

Slide 17

SunRPC is often called ONC RPC or Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call. The ONC RPC was specified in 1995 by RFC 1831 which was obseleted in 2009 by RFC 5531. Critics claim the XDR really abbreviates “eXtremely Dull and Routine.” The most recent specification of XDR is RFC 4506.

Here are some examples of ONC RPC programming from the Fall 2003 offering of CSCI 363.

XDR specification of the RPC functions
C include file generated by rpcgen
stub routines for client generated by rpcgen
- Client program written with calls to create_1 and increment_1 and clnt_create
RPC server driver generated by rpcgen
- Server program written to implement create_1_svc and increment_1_svc

NFS, the Network File Server, is written using the ONC RPC.

[…]$ rpcinfo host

Slides 33 to the end

There’s a lot of information about GIF, JPEG and MPEG in the remainder of this chapter, but you better review your math!