The Network Objects package provides a simple but powerful facility for remote method invocation in the context of Modula3. Under Network Objects, all subtypes of the object type NetObj.T are treated specially in that they can be passed to remote address spaces by reference. This remote reference appears at the destination as a surrogate object which is a subtype of the original object type. If the original type has methods, these methods can be remotely invoked through the surrogate.
The netobjd program provides a mechanism to publish objects for use by other address spaces. It implements a table which maps textual into objects. A service provider, for example, might advertise its service by registering an object with netobjd under some well-defined name. Similarly, a client might gain access to this service by retrieving the server's object from the netobjd instance on the server's machine.
There should be only one instance of netobjd per machine. This one instance is the machine-wide default agent for all imports and exports of network objects.
The netobjd program listens on a well known socket (currently TCP socket 9786) for incoming requests.