RFC Remote Function Call

A remote function call RFC enables a computer to execute a program an a different computer within the same LAN, WAN or Internet network. RFC is a common UNIX feature, which is found
also in other object-oriented operating systems. R/3 provides special DLLs for WINDOWS, NT
and UNIX to allow RFC calls from and to R/3.

A Remote Function Call enables a computer to execute a program an another computer. The
called program is executed locally on the remote computer using the remote computer’s
environment, CPU and data storage.

Remote function call is one of the great achievements of TCP/IP networks. Every computer within the network can accept an RFC-call and decides whether it wants to execute the request. Every modern FTP server implementation includes the RFC calling feature.

A classical network server stores the program code in a central location. When the program is called, the code will be transported via the network to the calling computer workstation and executed on the calling computer, consuming the caller’s resources of CPU, memory and disk.

An RFC calls the program on the remote computer. It is just like stepping over to the remote computer, typing in the program command line with all parameters and waiting for the result to be reported back to the calling computer. The calling computer does not provide any resources other than the parameters specified with the call.

Here is again what an RFC does.

• It calls the program on a remote computer and specify parameters if and as
necessary.

• The remote computer decides whether to fulfil the request and execute the
program.

• Every manipulation done by the called program is effective in the same way as if the program had started on the remote system.

• The calling program task waits meanwhile for the called program to terminate.

• When the RFC program terminates, it returns result values if applicable.

• The called program needs not to be present on the calling computer.

• The called program can be run under a completely different operation system,so you can call a WINDOWS program from UNIX and vice versa.

A typical RFC example is the internet with a web browser as the RFC client and the web server as the RFC server. Executing a server applet e.g. via CGI or a JAVA or JAVASCRIPT server side applet is actually a remote function call from the web browser to the HTTP server.

If R/3 is doing RFC calls into another system, then it does exactly what a browser does when performing a request on the HTTP or FTP server.