Sun last week put the latest version of its transport-independent TI-RPC Remote Procedure Call into the public domain, as it has done with previous versions, and made the source code available to all via Internet. This new TI-RPC, co-developed by Sun and AT&T as part of Unix System V.4, is compatible with the existing ONC RPC but permits applications to be insulated from the underlying network transports and independent of the operating system. So applications written for TCP/IP networks will run unmodified over Open Systems Interconnection-based networks, easing migration to emerging OSI standards. Because, as the first transport independent Remote Procedure Call available, it runs on both Network Computing System and Open Network Computing, Sun expects it to be the base of the development effort it has recently pledged to undertake with Hewlett-Packard to come up with a common Procedure Call. TI-RPC has been endorsed by Netwise Inc, which will support it with its tool compiler, and by Novell Inc, which demonstrated it last week at Connectathon in California under NetWare 3.11.
