Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
RPC is a communications technology originally developed by the DCE consortium. It builds on top of a network protocol such as TCP/IP to provide the ability to call functions on remote machines. When you design a client/server socket application, you work hard to get to the point where you can send a request to a remote object and get a response reliably. In our case, what we wanted was a remote function to reverse strings, not a load of messages. RPC handles all this, and is supported by Windows. It lets you build tightly coupled client and server applications.
On Windows, Distributed COM (which builds on top of RPC) has made the RPC programming interface pretty much obsolete. Python supports DCOM rather than RPC. For details, see Chapter 12.
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