Re: [Caml-list] RPCs, XML, Schemas, WSDL and SOAP

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2007 at 01:10:48PM +0200, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
> Am Freitag, den 06.07.2007, 19:57 +0100 schrieb Richard Jones:
> > Have you looked into using SunRPC?  ocamlnet provides an
> > implementation, it can be run over SSL, it's far more lightweight than
> > XML, and there's a strong chance you'll be able to interoperate with
> > clients and servers written in other languages.  
> 
> It is not only a chance, it simply works. But be warned: My SunRPC
> implementation is a very strong one, far better than what can be found
> in libc. Unfortunately, many developers have prejudices against this
> simple and robust protocol because of the weak (because old) C
> implementation.

Heh heh, tell me about it :-)

XDR is a simple, lightweight, statically-typed protocol.  SunRPC is a
simple RPC protocol built on XDR.  Unfortunately the glibc
implementation of SunRPC sucks greatly.  It is also essentially
unmaintained.  However there are alternatives (in C); for example
TI-RPC.

One "myth" of SunRPC is that it requires portmappers and UDP, which
are slow, a pain to use, make tunnelling more difficult, and have
well-known security vulnerabilities.  In fact it is easy to run SunRPC
over fixed TCP ports.

If you are considering interoperating with C or Python, or want to use
IPv6 or SSL, you might consider reading some pages I wrote on the
subject:

http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/secure_rpc/
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/sunrpc_reconnection/
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/xdr_tests/

and also see if you can pick up a second hand copy of this O'Reilly
book:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rpc/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat