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Introduction

The first application is really a toolbox to facilitate the construction of client-server applications which transmit Objective CAML values. To build an application using the toolbox, one need only implement serialization functions for the values to be transmitted, then apply a functor to obtain an abstract class for the server, then add the application's processing function by means of inheritance.

The second application revisits the robot simulation, presented on page ??, and adapts it to the client-server model. The server represents the world in which the robot clients move around. We thus simulate distributed memory shared by a group of clients possibly located on various machines on the network.

The third application is an implementation of some small HTTP servers (called servlets). A server knows how to respond to an HTTP request such as a request to retrieve an HTML page. Moreover, it is possible to pass values in these requests using the CGI format of HTTP servers. We will use this functionality right away to construct a server for requests on the association database, described on page ??. As a client, we will use a Web browser to which we will send an initial page containing the query form.


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