Wrapping DCE/OSF Client/Server Applications
Israel Gold and Uri Shani
Haifa Research Laboratory
IBM Israel Science and Technology
Matam -- Advanced Technology Center
Haifa 31905, Israel
E-mail: igold@vnet.ibm.com, shani@vnet.ibm.com
Abstract
DCE is a comprehensive RPC-based solution for client/server
applications across networks of heterogeneous machines.
Unfortunately, DCE is hard to learn and use. The fact is, that even
simple DCE applications may have a rather complicated structure,
requiring a good understanding of the elaborate DCE technology. This
paper presents GLUEGEN -- an automatic tool for "wrapping" plain C
code to become part of a distributed application. The approach taken
separates DCE-specific from DCE-independent elements of the
application, via a high-level specification language. This language
provides an easy and flexible way to describe the distributed
application topology, and frees the programmer from having to get into
the gory details of the DCE run-time.
Using GLUEGEN, the development of simple DCE applications remains a
rather simple task, requiring very little knowledge of DCE, and of the
DCE run-time. The tool is particularly useful for splitting existing
monolithic programs into clients and servers, with almost no change to
the original application code. Complex DCE applications which do not
neatly fit splitting are supported as well.
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