Overview of RPCs and how to use them for IPC

So far, we have looked at ways we can share data. In most cases, developers use this to do just data: send a payload from one system to another. However, the payload can also be something else. They can be commands to instruct a piece of software to do something. Instead of storing, transforming, and using data in systems, we can tell other systems to perform actions. In that case, we talk about RPC.

To control a system from the outside, establish a communication line, ensure your security is in order, and define a protocol.

There are many ways to do this. In the old days, we used to have SOAP, DCOM, WCF, and other techniques to do so.

RESTFul services versus RPC

You could consider RESTFul services to be some kind of RPC. However, they are not the same, and I do not want to go into RESTful services here. There are many similarities, but the basic idea behind RESTful services is that they are all about resources. Calls to web...