Welcome to the first blog post of this series consacred to my project of a RFC 707 implementation in Haskell.

Definition and description

RFC 707, whose formal name is “A High-Level Framework for Network-Based Resource Sharing” and which was published on the 14th of January 1976, is a primitive system of Remote Procedure Call.
It describes the manner in which a networked procedure call is to be done, the format each message (call and return) must abide by and the binary encoding of each message. In essence, it is the ancestor of ONC RPC, CORBA, SOAP… However, it doesn’t describe the transport protocol used, the ports used, any form of authentication… It has the inconvenient of being underspecified enough that two implementations don’t have much chance to understand each other and the advantage of being very lightweight.

Why will I implement it ?

First of all, I’ll implement it because it is a simple binary RPC protocol, a stepping stone to my project of an ONC RPC client implementation. Another reason is that’s there’s to my knowledge no implementation of this protocol, so it gives me more freedom to handle unspecified parts of the protocol, like how should I handle floating-point numbers. And it serves as a test of my capacities as an Haskell developper and as a spec reader. And there’s the fact that RPC systems are often distributed file systems’ basis, such as NFS or 9P.

Why Haskell ?

Because I appreciate and want to learn this language, and such a library seems like a good idea to me: after all, monads (and I/O in particular) is often cited as THE stumbling block for learning and mastering this language.

And after ?

The next blog post in this series will be consacred to the API my library will have and to the implementation choices I’ll make. After all, like I have said above, this RPC method is woefully underspecified by its RFC.

After this project, I’ll tackle either the ONC RPC client implementation or the AWT curses implementation.