From: Brad Hilton <bhilton@...>
Date: 2002-03-02T03:49:59+09:00
Subject: druby question (bug?)

Hello,

I am experimenting with druby and have a couple of questions for anyone
who may be more familiar with the code.  I am using ruby 1.6.6 and drb
1.3.4.2.

I find that with simple objects (where all elements are dumpable), DRb
on the client side tries to filter out undefined methods.  However, as
soon as the object contains a Proc object or something which can't be
dumped, the client side DRb simply passes the method calls to the server
and lets it determine whether the method is valid.

In my case I'd prefer the latter behavior always, because DRb seems to
raise errors when it shouldn't.  So, two questions:

1) Is there a way to force DRb to always pass methods back to the server
and let the server decide on the method's validity?  Or, to put it a
different way, is there a way to force DRb to only pass object ids back
and forth across the wire instead of the stringified object?

2) Does my sample code below work as expected?  Should DRb really raise
an error "undefined method 'serverName'" ?  Note that in server.rb, if
you uncomment the @proc line, things work and DRb seems to only pass
back and forth ruby objects' internal ids.  I would like DRb to behave
this way always if possible.

Here is some sample code which illustrates my problem:

server.rb
-------------------------
#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'drb'

class Proxy
  attr_reader(:serverName)
  def initialize
    @serverName = 'ftp.foo.com'
    # to make things work, just uncomment the following line:
    # @proc = Proc.new { }
  end
end

class Server
  def authenticate

    proxy = Proxy.new
    return proxy
  end
end

server = Server.new
DRb.start_service('druby://localhost:9001', server)

# wait for the threads to finish serving requests
DRb.thread.join
---------------------------------------------------------

client.rb
-----------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'drb'

DRb.start_service()

server = DRbObject.new(nil, 'druby://localhost:9001')

proxy = server.authenticate

puts proxy.serverName
-----------------------------------


Thanks!
-Brad