HP-UX SNAplus2 CPI-C Programmer's Guide (June 2003)

Concepts
What Is CPI-C?
Chapter 1 33
What Is CPI-C?
CPI-C stands for Common Programming Interface for Communications.
CPI-C is a portable application programming interface, or API, that
enables peer-to-peer communications among programs in an SNA
environment.
CPI-C enables application programs distributed across a network to
work together. By communicating with each other and exchanging data,
they can accomplish a single processing task, such as querying a remote
data base, copying a remote file, or sending or receiving electronic mail.
These programs communicate as peers, on an equal (rather than
hierarchical) basis. Together, programs distributed across a local-area or
wide-area network perform distributed processing.
SNAplus2 CPI-C Option Set Support
For Unix For C programs (not for Java programs), SNAplus2 CPI-C implements
IBM's CPI-C 2.0. It supports the mandatory CPI-C 2.0 conformance
class, Conversations, and the following optional conformance classes:
• LU 6.2
• Conversation-level nonblocking operation
• Server
• Data conversion routines
• Security
In addition, SNAplus2 CPI-C provides support for additional functions
that were defined as part of the X/Open CPI-C implementation and have
been incorporated into IBM CPI-C 2.0. SNAplus2 supports these entry
points for back-compatibility with existing CPI-C applications. Wherever
possible, CPI-C programmers should use the IBM CPI-C 2.0 versions of