Remote Procedure Calls with RPC
Explore how Go enables remote procedure calls through its net/rpc package by exposing methods on types for network communication. Learn to set up both server and client code, handle synchronous and asynchronous RPC calls, and understand the use of underlying protocols and data encoding for seamless inter-machine function calls.
We'll cover the following...
Go programs can communicate with each other through the net/rpc-package; so this is another application of the client-server paradigm. It provides a convenient means of making function calls over a network connection. Of course, this is only useful when the programs run on different machines. The rpc package builds on the package gob to turn its encode/decode automation into transport for method calls across the network.
A server registers an object, making it visible as a service with the type-name of the object. This provides access to the exported methods of that object across a network or other I/O connection for remote clients. It is all about exposing methods on types over a network. The package uses the Http and TCP protocol, and the gob package for data transport. A server may register multiple objects (services) of different types, but it is an error to register multiple objects of the same type.
Here we discuss a simple example:
package main
import (
"net/http"
"log"
"net"
"net/rpc"
"time"
"rpcobjects"
)
func main() {
calc := new(rpcobjects.Args)
rpc.Register(calc)
rpc.HandleHTTP()
listener, e := net.Listen("tcp", "0.0.0.0:3001")
if e != nil {
log.Fatal("Starting RPC-server -listen error:", e)
}
go http.Serve(listener, nil)
time.Sleep(1000e9)
}Remark: If you’re ...