Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!news@seismo.CSS.GOV@sun.UUCP From: news@seismo.CSS.GOV@sun.UUCP Newsgroups: mod.protocols Subject: Submission for mod-protocols Message-ID: <8702200536.AA22391@sun.Sun.COM> Date: Fri, 20-Feb-87 00:35:59 EST Article-I.D.: sun.8702200536.AA22391 Posted: Fri Feb 20 00:35:59 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 21-Feb-87 04:03:16 EST Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 52 Approved: protocols@red.rutgers.edu Path: sun!gorodish!guy From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: mod.protocols Subject: Re: Submission for mod-protocols Message-ID: <13682@sun.uucp> Date: 20 Feb 87 05:35:58 GMT References: <8702191514.AA20193@bunny.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.uucp Reply-To: guy@sun.UUCP (Guy Harris) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 40 >Courier and Clearinghouse were some of the finest higher level >protocols to exist when they were published. Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems >liked them so much, he rewrote them for TCP/IP and called them RPC and >YellowPages, respectfully. Well, aside from the fact that: 1) Bill didn't write them single-handedly (for example, the manager of the NFS group here, and one of the developers of Sun RPC and RPC-based services, is Bob Lyon - yes, the same Bob Lyon listed as one of the authors of the clearinghouse at the end of Oppen and Dalal's TOOIS paper). 2) They weren't "rewritten for TCP/IP"; Sun RPC has an object-oriented interface to the underlying transport protocol (you provide an interface module to the transport in question - which need not be a network protocol, but could be something like shared memory - that provides a certain set of operations) and has been put on top of, e.g., the ISO connectionless transport protocol (and could probably be put on top of, e.g., SPP). Also, Courier performs the functions of RPC and XDR combined, not just RPC. 3) The Yellow Pages is a lower-level remote database access protocol than Clearinghouse. The ranges of the mappings it performs consist of uninterpreted data, not property lists. It does not support queries like Clearinghouse's "LookupGeneric", because it doesn't interpret those data; you can look up something by name, or you can get every entry in a map and do whatever kind of lookup you want, but you can't say "give me all the objects that match this wildcarded name and that have thus-and-such a property." It also has no mechanism for updating mappings. I guess this isn't *too* far off (other than the fact that the proper term is "respectively", not "respectfully"). If you only have a few widely-spaced data points, be careful when attempting interpolation; it looks pretty silly when you try to use linear interpolation on data points taken from a sine wave....