One Minute Evaluations for 30 March-1 April

CS 537 - Client-Server Interfaces

• Question: Is RPC's idea used in HTTP? If so, are HTTP calls procedures?

  One minute response: Yes, to the extent that HTTP is a request-response protocol; but you could hardly compare making an HTTP request to calling a subroutine.

  At one point there was much controversy over whether or not it makes sense to talk about HTTP services in terms of procedures (or object methods). Roy Fielding was on one side with his REST (Representational state transfer) architecture and on the other side was a bunch of jabbering n-tier web monkeys. I don't know (or care) who won; I do recommend you read Fielding's thesis.

• Topic: HTTP 1.0, HTTP 1.1.

• Topic: HTTP.

  Question: What it TLS?

  One minute response: The (London) Times Literary Suppliment? Transport-Level Security (rfc 2246)? In what context was it used?

• Topic: HTTP protocol, transaction, message format, operation, communication, URIs.

• Topic: HTTP communication; CGI introduction.

• Topic: RPC system; main concept of it; how to use an existing RPC system to create an application.

• Topic: HTTP, the details; proxy servers; CGI.

• Topic: Internet-ready CORBA (SOAP/XML-RPC); HTTP 1.0, 1.1 ; CGI.

• Topic: HTTP transactions; HTTP operation; HTTP communication.

• Topic: InterORB protocol; HTTP protocol.

  Question: I didn't get the language independency in RPC.

  One minute response: Part of an RPC system includes a presentation syntax for data sent over the network (the presentation may be part of the RPC protocol, as it is for sRPC) or it may be an external part, as it is for ONC RPC. Once you squeeze data into a presentation syntax, it doesn't really matter where, or from which language, the data came; similarly, once you expand the data in the presentation syntax, it doesn't really matter to where, or into which language the data goes.)

This page last modified on 16 July 2003.