tarpc: Tim & Adam's RPC lib

Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product.

tarpc is an RPC framework for rust with a focus on ease of use. Defining a service can be done in just a few lines of code, and most of the boilerplate of writing a server is taken care of for you.

Documentation

What is an RPC framework?

"RPC" stands for "Remote Procedure Call," a function call where the work of producing the return value is being done somewhere else. When an rpc function is invoked, behind the scenes the function contacts some other process somewhere and asks them to compute the function instead. The original function then returns the value produced by that other server.

More information

Usage

Add to your Cargo.toml dependencies:

tarpc = "0.5.0"

Example

#[macro_use]
extern crate tarpc;

mod hello_service {
    service! {
        rpc hello(name: String) -> String;
    }
}
use hello_service::Service as HelloService;

struct HelloServer;
impl HelloService for HelloServer {
    fn hello(&self, name: String) -> String {
        format!("Hello, {}!", name)
    }
}

fn main() {
    let addr = "localhost:10000";
    let server_handle = HelloServer.spawn(addr).unwrap();
    let client = hello_service::Client::new(addr).unwrap();
    assert_eq!("Hello, Mom!", client.hello("Mom".into()).unwrap());
    drop(client);
    server_handle.shutdown();
}

The service! macro expands to a collection of items that collectively form an rpc service. In the above example, the macro is called within the hello_service module. This module will contain a Client (and AsyncClient) type, and a Service trait. The trait provides default fns for starting the service: spawn and spawn_with_config, which start the service listening over an arbitrary transport. A Client (or AsyncClient) can connect to such a service. These generated types make it easy and ergonomic to write servers without dealing with sockets or serialization directly. See the tarpc_examples package for more sophisticated examples.

Documentation

Use cargo doc as you normally would to see the documentation created for all items expanded by a service! invocation.

Additional Features

• Connect over any transport that impls the Transport trait.
• Concurrent requests from a single client.
• Any type that impls serde's Serialize and Deserialize can be used in the rpc signatures.
• Attributes can be specified on rpc methods. These will be included on both the Service trait methods as well as on the Client's stub methods.
• Just like regular fns, the return type can be left off when it's -> ().
• Arg-less rpc's are also allowed.

Planned Improvements (actively being worked on)

• Automatically reconnect on the client side when the connection cuts out.
• Support asynchronous server implementations (currently thread per connection).
• Support generic serialization protocols.

Contributing

To contribute to tarpc, please see CONTRIBUTING.

License

tarpc is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.

See LICENSE for details.