Netwise Inc of Boulder, Colorado is one of the first companies to announce publicly its submission to the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing request for technology. Supported by users such as Data General, NCR, Novell, Unify and Wang, the company said it would be submitting its RPC Remote Procedure Call product to the Foundation’s third request for technology. RPC has been sold by Netwise for the past two years, and is claimed to provide advanced remote procedure call technology to over 30 different computers and to popular networks. Novell Inc uses the tool as its standard RPC interface, and Unify Corp is using RPC to implement the client-server and remote database features in its forthcoming release of Accell-SQL for Unify 2000. The tool includes two primary components: an RPC compiler to generate network communications source code that will support distributed processing between all components of a local area network application, independently of hardware and operating system; and a network library for a specific network and operating system environment. Support is available for MS-DOS, OS/2, Unix, Xenix, Wang VS, Hewlett-Packard MPE and DEC VAX/VMS, with network libraries for NetWare, LAN Manager, TCP/IP, DECnet, I*, NetIPC and NetBIOS (XNS). According to UK distributor Integralis Ltd of Bracknell, the tools can be used by applications developers who do not have to be skilled in real-time software development.
