Other networking components

This chapter discusses some practicalities of networking by discussing some other tools that are commonly used. The two main topics discussed are remote method call (RMC), to refer to both remote procedure call (RPC) or remote method invocation (RMI), and the overall architecture of networked virtual environments (NVEs) and network games (NGs) systems. RMC is a class of networking technology that creates the impression to the programmer that a function call is made locally, whereas it is actually executed on another machine. The distinction between the two terms, RPC and RMI, is usually that the former refers to function calls in imperative code, whereas the latter refers to method calls on objects. The techniques of RPC or RMI techniques, which are very widely used in the broader realm of distributed systems and which have a role in NVEs are discussed. A larger system is then discussed, to show how object sharing, events and RPC/RMI all fit together to make a more fully-featured system. RMC was developed as a generic interface for distributed systems. It gives the appearance that remote function calls are actually local. Thus it has a good fit to transactions or infrequent interactions. Most complex systems or middleware support some mixture of RMC, message-based, and object-sharing systems. System architecture and how particular systems support the programmer in writing large applications are also discussed in the chapter.

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