On the open source (but not free in cost for commercial app)
Not being free to use it in a commercial application is kind of a no-go for many areas like in boost i think. Your library therefore needs to be independent of RakNet.
networking library RakNet, I created a templated RPC interface for it.
It is very efficient, type-safe on both side, and the external
interface is more simple then what you have above. Quite literally
you just define you function, class member, whatever, then just
register it.
I looked at the example in RakNet but didn't look at the source yet.
How is this call made type-safe?
rpc3Inst.CallCPP("&C::ClassMemberFunc", GetNetworkID(), a1,a2,c1,c2,RakNet::_RPC3::Deref(d1),d2,bs1,bs2,rpcFromNetwork);
How do you avoid naming collisions with other namespaces?
There is a helper thing to that it returns that you call
instead. The tutorial video is at
http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/raknet/manual/RPC3Video.htm and if you
download it, it is RPC3. I wrote that and donated it to his project.
I mostly ripped it out of an old script registration system (that
build up the variable conversion operations and called the native
C/C++ function as appropriate). It makes heavy use of Boost.Fusion
(this was right when Fusion was added to Boost). It made for a
wonderful and easy to use system. The above tutorial mostly focuses
on features that his old assembly driven RPC system was not capable
of, but mine had more features that he never seems to use. For
example, when you register a function you can store it in a
boost/tr1::function<> object, then if you call that instead it saves a
map lookup for the name, and based on the setup you set for it (only
call on client systems, only call on server, only call on owner,
etc...) it called everything appropriately, very powerful (I really
wish he used that feature, I do not like the fact he shows them how to
do it dynamically, hence the hashmap lookup...
It looks like there's one object registration for the whole network in RPC3, while in my library every node has its own registrations because nodes can join and leave the network at every point in time. There isn't even "one network" because there are only real and virtual peer-to-peer-connections between nodes.
But yea, look at the tutorial video for the basic feature rundown (I
did not make that video, Rak'kar did). Another feature mine has that
he does not display, if your function has a parameter of Raknet::RPC3*
then it auto-fills that in with the RPC3 registration object, letting
you get detailed information about your call like if it is a remote
call, local call, etc...
This is analogous to the optional "link_callee&" reference in my library and it's really useful for functions aware of the remote calls.
It also check for various class hierarchies,
such as if a NetworkIDObject is a subclass of any class pointer passed
in, it will use the corresponding registered NetworkIDObject on the
remote system and so forth. Raknet::Bitstream is a bitstream as you
would expect (I really want a bitstream like Raknet::Bitstream in
boost, does anyone know if one already exists? the only ones I have
found do not have the capabilities), and I had him add the operator
>>/<< functions so streaming can be overloaded.
That's one advantage over my library, because so far, nothing other is done with the parameters but serializing/deserializing them to call the function. It's not aware of networking capable objects. And i haven't checked, how it would handle pointers to objects.
Either way, he changed the code slightly, added a few more default
overloads, etc... since I gave it to him a long while back (back in
Boost 1.35's time period, 1.35 was new), but take a look at the RPC3
code and see how it does it, actually very simple, very powerful,
type-safe, overloadability, etc... I would be quite happy if my code
ended up in Boost.
Is your library independent of RakNet? Can you put your code under the boost-license?
When reading the mailing list, the process of putting a library into boost is rather time-consuming and can take years until everything works on all required compilers is well documented and in in harmony with the other boost libraries. From that point on, it requires constant attention to keep up with new compilers and changes in other boost libraries.
But, thanks to fusion and such, does not require variadic templated
(although tr1::function is the main restriction, if it uses variadic
templates then there is no real limit to my system then).