CDE 1.1: Remote Procedure Call
Copyright © 1997 The Open Group

Frontmatter


CAE Specification
DCE 1.1: Remote Procedure Call
Document Number: C706


©October 1997, The Open Group All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.


This document and the software to which it relates are derived in part from materials which are copyright © 1990, 1991 Digital Equipment Corporation and copyright © 1990, 1991 Hewlett-Packard Company.


Any comments relating to the material contained in this document may be submitted to The Open Group at:

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Preface

The Open Group

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Formed in 1996 by the merger of the X/Open Company Ltd. (founded in 1984) and the Open Software Foundation (founded in 1988), The Open Group is supported by most of the world's largest user organizations, information systems vendors, and software suppliers. By combining the strengths of open systems specifications and a proven branding scheme with collaborative technology development and advanced research, The Open Group is well positioned to meet its new mission, as well as to assist user organizations, vendors, and suppliers in the development and implementation of products supporting the adoption and proliferation of systems which conform to standard specifications.

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This Document

This document is a CAE Specification (see above). It specifies Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services, interface, protocols, encoding rules and the Interface Definition Language (IDL).

The purpose of this document is to provide a portability guide for RPC application programs and a conformance specification for RPC implementations.

Structure

This document is organised into four parts.

Part 1, Remote Procedure Call Introduction describes this document in detail, covering application portability, services and protocols, and conformance requirements. It contains material relevant to both application programmers and implementors.

Part 2, RPC Application Programmer's Interface specifies a portable RPC Application Programmer's Interface (API). It contains material relevant both to application programmers and implementors.

Part 3, Interface Definition Language and Stubs specifies the IDL and stubs. It contains material relevant both to application programmers and implementors.

Part 4, RPC Services and Protocols specifies RPC services and protocols. It contains material mainly relevant to implementors.

This document also includes a series of appendixes containing material that supplements the main text. These contain material relevant both to application programmers and implementors.

Intended Audience

This document is written for RPC application programmers and developers of RPC implementations.

Typographical Conventions
The following typographical conventions are used throughout this document: In addition to these generic conventions, several chapters of this document use conventions specific to the topic covered, including language conventions (.cX chap4 "" 1 and Stubs ), encoding conventions (.cX chap14 ), 1 and protocol machine conventions (.cX chap8 "" 1 to Connection-oriented RPC Protocol Machines inclusive). These conventions are specified in the relevant chapters.

Trademarks

Motif®, OSF/1®, and UNIX® are registered trademarks and the IT DialToneTM;, The Open GroupTM;, and the "X Device"TM; are trademarks of The Open Group.

Referenced Documents

The following documents are referenced in this specification:

DCE Directory

The Open Group CAE Specification, October 1997, The Open Group DCE 1.1: Authentication and Security Services (Publication number: C311).

DCE Directory

The Open Group CAE Specification, October 1997, The Open Group DCE 1.1: Directory Services (Publication number: C705).

ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985

Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic.

ISO 8823

ISO 8823:1988, Information Processing Systems - Open Systems Interconnection - Connection-oriented Presentation Protocol Specification.

ISO C

ISO/IEC 9899:1990: Programming Languages - C, including:
Amendment 1:1995 (E), C Integrity (Multibyte Support Extensions (MSE) for ISO C).

ISO/TR 8509

ISO/TR 8509:1987, Information Processing Systems - Open Systems Interconnection - Service Conventions.

System/370

IBM System/370 Principles of Operation, 1974, International Business Machines Corporation.

VAX11 Architecture

VAX11 Architecture Handbook, 1979, Digital Equipment Corporation.

The following documents were used in the development of this specification, but are not directly referenced:


Harel, D. On Visual Formalisms. Communications of the ACM 31, 5 (May 1988), pp. 514-530.


Harel, D. Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems. Science of Computer Programming 8 (1987), pp. 231-274.


Harel, Pnueli, Schmidt, Sherman On the Formal Semantics of Statecharts Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (Ithaca, NY, June 22-24). IEEE Press New York, 1987, pp. 54-64.


i-Logix Inc., The Languages of Statemate Documentation for the Statemate System, January 1991, Burlington, MA.


i-Logix Inc., The Semantics of Statecharts Documentation for the Statemate System, January 1991, Burlington, MA.


Please note that the html version of this specification may contain formatting aberrations. The definitive version is available as an electronic publication on CD-ROM from The Open Group.

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