1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of data processing. More specifically, the present invention relates to the employment of namespaces to facilitate local and remote function invocation.
2. Background Information
Ever since the invention of the first computer, computer scientists have continuously tried to improve the productivity of programmers, such that more applications can be developed with fewer resources to take advantage of the continuous advancements being made in the art of computer and related technologies. First assembler languages were developed to replace machine languages. Then, high level languages, such as FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I and so forth, were developed to further improve the productivity of programmers. Development of high level languages were followed by structured languages such as Pascal and C, and then object oriented programming languages such as C++. To facilitate development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, “new” languages such as the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Java, Javascript, Perl and CGI were developed.
Most languages also support function calls, which may be user-defined functions or pre-packaged functions, such as those included with the languages' runtime libraries. However, in the earlier days, to be invocable, the functions must exist on the same system as the callers of the functions. Later on, to facilitate development of client-server computing, remote procedure call (RPC), a messaging protocol, was developed to facilitate a program executing on one computer to remotely invoke and access the service of a function on another computer. More recently, to facilitate development of web based applications, and employment of object oriented programming techniques, remote method invocation (RMI) was developed to facilitate interacting with objects on a server.
With the advance of public networks, such as the Internet, numerous function resources exist in different parts of the networks, written in different languages on different platforms. It is desirable to be able to invoke these function resources, regardless of their location, host language or host platform without limitation to the relationship between the invoking computing device and the function hosting computing device. Thus, an approach that can efficiently realize this potential is desired.