In Frontier 5.0 we also added TCP connections, with specific support for HTTP, client and server, and content management, for both Mac and Windows. And in 5.1 we have full support for XML-RPC, discussed in the next section. RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call. It's a procedure name with a parameter list that's sent to another process, possibly on another machine. The remote procedure returns a result to the caller who waits for it to finish.
Procedure calls are the basis for all software.
With procedure calls running over the Internet comes the possibility of more powerful distributed computing, with more connections between systems implemented on different OSs and in different programming languages. An example As an example, imagine a procedure running on a server that accepts a text representation of a document and returns a Postscript rendering. Here's what such a call would look like in a scripting language. These are only publishing services, similar interfaces could work for stock purchases, plane reservations or filing income taxes. It's about setting up servers to do things that are worth money.