Chapter 11. The User-Supplied Function Feature

Table of Contents
Motivation
Solution
For the Client
For the Server
Conclusion

Motivation

In the preceding sections, we described all the client interfaces to NetSolve. In these descriptions we assumed that the only input the user had to supply to NetSolve was numerical data, that is, matrices, vectors, or scalars. This assumption is valid for a lot of numerical software. However, for some software that we would like to include in NetSolve via NetSolve servers, we need an additional feature. Indeed, numerous scientific packages require the user to provide numerical data as well as a function. Typically, nonlinear software requires the user to pass a pointer to a subroutine that computes the nonlinear function. This is a problem in NetSolve because the computation is performed remotely and the user cannot provide NetSolve with a pointer to one of his linked-in subroutines. The only solution is to send code over the network to the server. This approach raises a lot of issues, including security.