Many applications can be decomposed into the processing done by servers and by clients. A single server will exchange data with multiple remote clients. In a hybrid situation, an application can be both a client of other remote computers, and a server to remote clients. There is an intentional asymmetry that is used to simplify the definition of the protocol: a client makes a request to the server, and the server responds to the client. The client initiates each request and waits for the response.
Separating clients and servers means that objects must be transmitted between the two processes. We can decompose the larger problem into two smaller problems. The inter-networking protocols define a way to transmit bytes from a process on one host to a process on another host. Serialization techniques transform our objects into bytes and then reconstruct...
