[jcifs] Re: Printing, RPCs, and Looking Forward

[Christopher R. Hertel]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 06:48:51PM -0400, Allen, Michael B (RSCH) wrote:
> If I were ever too seriously look at printing (and it's not very attractive
> for reasons explained previously) I think it would have to be based on
> RPC mechanisms. Using RPCs for all of this stuff (not just printing)
> will be the only way to ensure stability.
> 
> Looking forward I think we probably have one more iteration to add
> setting file attributes and so on. That will be 1.0 I suppose. Then comes
> RPCs. But at the rate I work on jCIFS don't hold your breath.
> 
> Mike

You will want to dig into it before you try.  It may be that the driver 
installation part is something we can skip, which would be great.  We are 
a client, after all.  The problem is that you need to convert the data 
into a format that the server can handle, and the expectation is that the 
client's driver and the server's driver have done a handshake at some 
point.

I don't know the RPC-based printing system as well as I'd like, but the
folks who do have assured me that it is one of the most awful bits of 
kludged-up RPC manglement they've seen.

Good luck.

Chris -)-----

References:

>From SambaXP-2002, presentation in pictures and sound:
  http://sambaxp.org/sambaXP_2002/allison.pdf
  http://sambaxp.org/sambaXP_2002/2-05-allison_52min.56kbps.mp3

>From CIFS-2002, Jerry's tutorial:
  http://www.cifs2003.org/conference/program/presentations/carter.pdf

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh at ubiqx.org