HP DCE/9000 Application Development Tools for HP-UX 11i Release Note

HP DCE/9000 Version 1.8 Application Development Tools for HP-UX 11i Release Note

Developing DCE Applications with HP DCE/9000

Applications.

• To debug an HP DCE threads application with DDE, use the -dce_thread option. By

default, DDE assumes that the application is single- or kernel-threaded.

The debug and dde commands have been extended to take the -dce_thread option. For

example:debug -dce_thread averagedde -dce_thread average

See Section 3.2.1 (DDE) of the HP-UX Programming Tools Release Notes (5965-4409) and

the dde man page for more information about the -dce_thread option.

• HP DCE uses the HP-UXSIGCHLD and SIGVTALRM signals internally. When debugging

HP DCE servers or clients, you must ensure that these signals, when received, are passed

along to the target process. If you are using DDE or xdb, you can modify your debugger

start-up ﬁles as follows:

~/.dderc: alias `after_debug [ del int signal SIGCHLD;del int signal SIGVTALRM]

~/.xdbrc: z 18 rs # do not stop or report SIGCHLD z 20 rs # do not stop or report

SIGVTALRM

See

Programming with Threads on HP-UX

and the discussion of -signal() in this

chapter for more information on the use of signals with HP DCE applications.

• Be sure the application has an exception handler installed that can ﬁeld any RPC

exceptions.

• Run the server side of your application under the debugger so that exceptions raised in

server code will trap into the debugger rather than being reﬂected back to the client

process via RPC. This makes it easier to identify bugs in the server that might otherwise

appear to be client bugs.

See the README ﬁle and server_debug.ksh script in

/opt/dce/share/hpexamples/string_conv for information on debugging "dced-started"

servers via xdb or dde.

Using HP DCE with C++ Applications

If you want to use C++ with standard DCE to create DCE applications, there are some

practices you must avoid. Most of these relate to lack of thread-safeness of C++ operations.

The following list describes the practices you should avoid. These guidelines apply to HP C++

compiler version A.3.70 and later.

By taking these precautions, you should be able to productively use C++ to write DCE

applications.

• When using unsafe constructs, be sure to use the constructs in only one thread at a time.