PowerRPC V1.1 Installation, Configuration and User guide

PowerRPC is an RPC development tool that can make any of C function calls across process boundaries over the network, it slashes client-server development time by automatically generating networking code from an interface.

Installation procedure

1. make a directory to host the powerRPC distribution.
2. untar or unzip the distributed files into the directory made in step 1).
   For *.tgz files, first use the gunzip command to decompress, and then use the tar command to untar.
   For *.zip files, please use a ZIP tool that is capable of handling long filenames and please preserve the directory tree structure when unzip.
3. modify your search path so that the powerRPC executable in the bin/ directory can be found. For UNIX platforms, you may make a symbolic link to the executable  in a directory that is already in the search path, such as /usr/local/bin/.
4. Windows user only: copy the pwrpc32.dll in the bin/ directory to a system directory such as Windows/system/

PowerRPC configuration

PowerRPC search its configuration parameters in the following order:

1. Process environment
2. Configure file $POWERRPC_HOME/powerRPC.init, where $POWERRPC_HOME is the directory in which the powerRPC bin/ directory resides.
3. Configure file $HOME/.powerrpc .

Important configurations are,

• CPP            ---- the C preprocessor, for UNIX the default is /lib/cpp or /usr/ccs/lib/cpp, for Windows the deafult is cl /C /E /nologo .
• ANSI-CC   ---- the ANSI C compiler, default is cc .
• Please look at the file data/powerrpc.init.sample for an sample.

PowerRPCˇˇUsage

Windows programmers only:
1. After you use the IDL compiler to generate the client-server stub code from an interface, you can either use the generated makefile to compile the server and client on the command line, or simply add the C files into the projects they belong to. When use the powerRPC generated makefile, you need to set the LIB and INCLUDE enviroment varible for searching C libraries and include files, when you add the files into an IDE project, you need to add the $POWERRPC_HOME/lib to the library search path and $POWERRPC_HOME/include to the include file search path.

2. After you have compiled the server, you must first start the portmapper for the server to register (unless you use a fixed port and set appropriate properties to bypass portmapper). The portmapper(portmap.exe) has a simple UI, to get one which is a Windows NT service, please contact Netbula.

After the these major steps, you are ready to put powerRPC to work.

Happy programming.

Any questions? Please email support@netbula.com, and prompt answers will be provided. For license information please visit our site at http://www.netbula.com.

Have a nice day!