NAME

       RpcRegistry - name space for finding RPC services

SYNOPSIS

       #include <Dispatch/rpcregistry.h>

DESCRIPTION

       RpcRegistry  provides  a  name  space  for  finding  RPC  services based on the use of NFS
       filesystems among a group of hosts.  When an RPC service wishes to record  its  host  name
       and  port number, it will give the path of a file in which to store the information.  When
       a client wants to find the RPC service's host name and port number, it will give the  path
       of a file from which to read the information.  Usually the path will be the name of a file
       in the current working  directory  since  different  hosts  may  have  different  absolute
       pathnames for the same file in a NFS filesystem.  The RPC service's name space is the name
       space of the host's filesystem and the file's contents provides the information needed  to
       open a connection to the RPC service.

PUBLIC OPERATIONS

       Each  function  is  a  static  member  function, which means a program can call it without
       having to instantiate an RpcRegistry object.  Each function returns true if  it  succeeded
       or false if some error occurred.

       boolean record(const char* path, int port)
              Record  the RPC service's host name and port number in the given file.  If the file
              already exists, its previous contents will be lost.

       boolean erase(const char* path)
              Remove the file which stores the RPC service's host name and port number so that no
              more clients will be able to contact the RPC service.

       boolean find(const char* path, char*& hostname, int& port)
              Open  the  file  which  stores the RPC service's host name and port number.  If the
              file does not exist, return failure silently.  If the file does exist, read the RPC
              service's  host  name and port address from it.  If ``hostname'' is nil upon entry,
              it will contain the address of a dynamically allocated string upon exit (which must
              be freed by the caller).

SEE ALSO

       RpcService(3I)