The features described in this topic are obsolete
and should not be used in new IDL code.

Obsolete Remote Procedure Calls

Note
Remote Procedure Calls are still included in IDL. The RPC API described here (the API included with IDL version 4.0) has been replaced with a new API. See the External Development Guide for details on the RPC API included with IDL version 5.0 and later.

Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) allow one process (the client process) to have another process (the server process) execute a procedure call just as if the caller process had executed the procedure call in its own address space. Since the client and server are separate processes, they can reside on the same machine or on different machines. RPC libraries allow the creation of network applications without having to worry about underlying networking mechanisms.

IDL supports RPCs so that other applications can communicate with IDL. A library of C language routines is included to handle communication between client programs and the IDL server. Note that remote procedure calls are supported only on UNIX platforms.

The current implementation allows IDL to be run as an RPC server and your own program to be run as a client. IDL commands can be sent from your application to the IDL server, where they are executed. Variable structures can be defined in the client program and then sent to the IDL server for creation as IDL variables. Similarly, the values of variables in the IDL server session can be retrieved into the client process.