INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION MECHANISM FOR HETEROGENEOUS COMPUTER PROCESSES

An applet which executes in isolation within an applet viewer builds and sends remote procedure calls by encoding remote procedure calling (RPC) requests as requests for documents in a known, standard document request format, such as a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) universal resource locator (URL). A portion of the name space for documents which can be retrieved according to HTTP is reserved for RPC requests. The applet process encodes an RPC request as a request to receive a document in the portion of the name space reserved for RPC requests and sends the URL to an RPC process. The RPC process receives the URL and determines that the URL specifies a document in the name space portion reserved for RPC requests and parses the RPC request from the URL and services the RPC request. In addition, the RPC process places any results produced by servicing the RPC request into a document which is then sent to the applet. In addition, the applet sends an HTTP URL which indicates the applet is ready to process RPC requests from the RPC process. In response, the RPC process sends RPC requests as portions of a virtual document which is sent to the applet in response to the HTTP URL. The applet receives the portions of the virtual document, parses the RPC requests therefrom, and processes the parsed RPC requests.