3 Protocol Details

As described in section 1.3, the RDS Transport Protocol specification defines a protocol that enables a customer application on the client to query and process data from a remote server. The client and the server share a common representation of the data. The client, upon receiving data from the server, maintains a cached local copy of the data as a RecordSet object. The customer application on the client makes changes to the local copy of the data, and chooses when to send those changes to the server, individually or in batches, using the RDS Transport Protocol. In this regard, the protocol provides a flexible means of managing changes between the client and server. The number of changes that can be batched together is not limited by the RDS Transport Protocol.

The protocol provides a means for populating the client cache and transmitting those results back to the server. This section describes the important elements of the client software and the server software necessary to support this protocol.

The main object used on the server and on the client is the RecordSet object.