vnr@seneca.berkeley.edu (Vangati Narender Reddy) (06/28/91)
Hello folks, I am trying to develop a dynamic RPC system (based on Sun RPC) in which clients do not have to compile with the generated client stubs. They should be able to use a run-time library to make RPC calls..This would eliminate the need of the clients depending on the servers and compiling everytime the server changes. For this the major problem I am facing is run-time marshalling of the arguments of a procedure. Native data types of a language can be implemented easily enough, but user-defined data types pose difficulties. Accepting of these structures has to be done as a char * as we do not know what to expect at compile time. At run time, we do know what to expect (from the parameters of the procedure), but the accesing of the fields of these structures cannot be done. Advancement of the pointer by a certain number of bytes depending upon the type to expect turns out to be very much architechture dependent. I would appreciate some comments on this and any pointers to help me solve this problem. Has anybody ever attempted this before or are doing so now? Any suggestions would be useful. V. Narender Reddy Concurrent Engineering Research Center Morgan Town, WV - 26505 Ph: (304) - 293 - 7226 vnr@cerc.wvu.wvnet.edu