Introduction

The TCP/IP protocol stack is now available for a long period of time (in computer business terms at least) but in the last few years it has become more and more important for the communication between individual computers, especially since the evolution of the rapidly growing World Wide Web applications. Many applications have since been developed on various platforms but how often have you searched for a tool matching your requirements but never found it? This gap in the list of tools could be closed with programs written by yourselves - and this is where REXX comes into the game.

REXX is a very simple programming language that can be used for a large variety of purposes. It's easy to learn and has a number of useful function packages. One of these function packages is the REXX socket library available on different platforms which will be covered in this tutorial. We will learn the basic concept in TCP/IP communications and how you can communicate with other computers using REXX. One chapter will cover a higher level protocol used on the TCP/IP protocol stack: HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). This chapter will give you the basic knowledge of writing TCP/IP socket programs in REXX. With this knowledge it will be easy for you to expand the sample programs and adapt them to your own needs. This tutorial expects basic knowledge of the REXX programming language and will only explain TCP/IP related topics.

The following chapters are available in this tutorial:

This tutorial has initially been written for the SHARE Technical Conference which took place in New Orleans, Lousiana from July 28th to August 2nd 1996 and has been extended for the SHARE Technical Conference in San Francisco from March 2nd to March 7th 1997. It is also available as a 460 KB Postscript file.

The samples shown in this tutorial are available in a single 11 KB ZIP file.

Author information:


Christian Michel

REXX Development

IBM Germany

German Software Development Laboratory

Boeblingen, Germany



E-mail: cmichel@vnet.ibm.com

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