RPC

A Remote Procedure Call, which builds on some form of inter-process communication, provides a mechanism for calling a procedure in a program running on a remote system is called.

Description

The big command in this area is Tk's send, which uses X server resources to communicate scripts and their results between processes (or more precisely, between Tcl interpreters which have Tk loaded). IPC packages such as comm emulate send's API.

Macintosh, of course has Applescript (see also Applescript and legacy applications) and TclAE. Both work by sending AppleEvents (AEs) to target applications. The difference is that TclAE lets you construct the AE directly using Tcl commands, whereas Applescript is a separate scripting language whose tell command constructs an AE and sends it.

A system of Linux origin is D-Bus, where the bus is operated by a daemon process that several parties may connect to. Underlying mechanisms include (but are not limited to) unix sockets and TCP/IP sockets, but that level is usually seen only by the standard D-BUS library, which provides a message passing interface.

Tcl RPC Systems

comm

A socket-based send. Now a part of tcllib.

TclSOAP

dp_RPC

A pure-Tcl replacement for Tcl-DP

send

A Tk command to execute a command in a different application.

SIMPL

Send/Receive/Reply a-la QNX.

Tcl-DP

Adds TCP, UDP, IP-multicast connection management, remote procedure call (RPC), serial communication and distributed object protocols to Tcl. A C API allows non-Tcl RPC clients to send commands to an RPC server and receive responses.

Scotty's UDP

Need some clarification on why this should be listed here.

tclipc1-0.tar.gz

winsend

Uses Windows COM to implement send.

Tkpvm

Claims to do something along this line.

General RPC Protocols

There are Tcl implementations of many of the following protocols

CORBA

JSON-RPC

XML-RPC

SOAP

WSDL