Glossary (ONC+ Developer's Guide)

ONC+ Developer's Guide

The following terms define the RPC concepts used throughout this manual.
client: A program or system that uses the services of a remote program or system.
client handle: A client process data structure that represents the binding of the client to a particular server's RPC program.
connection-oriented transport: See stream transport.
connectionless transport: See datagram transport.
datagram transport: Datagram transports have less overhead than connection-oriented transports but are considered less reliable and data transmissions are limited by buffer size.
deserialize: Convert data from XDR format to a machine-specific representation.
handle: An abstraction used by the service libraries to refer to a file or a file-like object such as a socket.

host: A computer (mainframe, mini, server, workstation, or personal computer) connected to a network.
MT hot: An interface is multithreaded hot if the library or call automatically creates threads.
MT safe: An interface is multithreaded safe if it can be called in a threaded environment. An MT-safe interface may be invoked concurrently for multiple threads.
network client: Usually client. A process that makes remote procedure calls to services.
network server: Usually server. A process that performs a network service. A server may support more than one version of a remote program to be forward compatible with changing protocols.
network service: A collection of one or more remote service programs.
ping: The ping service is used to verify activity on a remote system.
remote program: A program that implements one or more remote procedures.
RPC Language (RPCL): A C-like programming language translated by the rpcgen compiler. RPCL is a superset of XDR Language.
RPC library: libnsl, specified to the link editor at compile time. Also known as the RPC package.
RPC protocol: The message-passing protocol that is the basis of the RPC package.
RPC/XDR: See RPC Language.
serialize: Converting data from a machine representation to XDR format.

server: A process that provides remote service to clients.
stream transport: Stream transport is considered reliable. It supports byte-stream deliveries of unlimited data size.
transport: The fourth layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Reference Model.
transport handle: An abstraction used by the RPC libraries to refer to the transport's data structures.
TI-RPC: Transport-independent RPC. The version of RPC supported in SunOS 5.x.
TS-RPC: Transport-specific RPC. The version of RPC supported in SunOS 4.x. TS-RPC is also supported in SunOS 5.x.
universal address: A machine-independent representation of a transport address.
virtual circuit transport: See stream transport.
XDR Language: A data description language and data representation protocol.

Glossary