Technical data

• Many application developers are familiar with the programming environment.
• In addition to the TCP/IP protocols, there are options for other types of
protocols.
For more details, refer to the Compaq TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS Sockets API
and System Services Programming manual.
1.3.2 OpenVMS QIO System Service Interface
The standard I/O programming interface on OpenVMS uses the QIO (queue
input/output) system services. QIO services provide a rich set of functions for
controlling devices, and connections and for performing input (read) and output
(write) operations.
The benefits of using the OpenVMS QIO interface include:
• Support for the QIO interface in the following programming languages:
MACRO-32
Compaq C
Compaq Fortran
Compaq Ada
Compaq and VAX BASIC
VAX BLISS-32
Compaq COBOL
VAX Pascal
Compaq PL/1
• Ability to handle complex applications with many concurrent connections
• Efficient input/output operations
• Robust asynchronous event handling (While sockets offer the ability to
do nonblocking I/O operations, they do not offer the ability to perform
asynchronous I/O.)
• Ease of DECnet applications portability to TCP/IP protocols
For more details, refer to the Compaq TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS Sockets API
and System Services Programming manual.
SRI QIO Compatibility
TCP/IP Services provides support for customer applications using the
INETDRIVER QIO interface developed at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in
1980-81. An SRI QIO emulator that translates non-TCP/IP Services QIO interfaces
into TCP/IP Services QIO programming interfaces can be configured by using
the TCPIP$CONFIG procedure.
1.3.3 ONC RPC Programming Interface
The RPC programming interface is an industry-standard, portable API that is an
efficient alternative to using sockets for application development. Programmers do
not need an in-depth knowledge of networking protocols to use RPC.
One strong point of the RPC interface is its ability to distribute functions across the
network. This is done in an architecture-independent manner, thereby avoiding
problems with floating-point formats and byte-address ordering that often occur
when interacting between architectures.
This API includes:
1–6 Introducing Compaq TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS