Remote procedure calls for interactive applications

As front-end developers, we call remote machines all day long. We fetch URLs, we get data from APIs, and we interact with various back-end services. We think in terms of resources. But what if we could think in terms of functions instead? Imagine that we call a function foo() on our local machine, and it runs on a remote one, as if the network did not exist. How can we orchestrate this process? This is something I discovered during my latest personal project and that I will explore in this article. Something that feels quite magical to me (again!). The project before the theory Before going further, let's take a look at my LED board project that led me to these remote function calls. An LED board is an LED matrix panel that is quite compact and can be controlled by a microcomputer like a Raspberry Pi. We can write a script, running on the Raspberry Pi, to communicate with this board and give it instructions like "turn on the LED at position x:20 y:32 in blue". It can be illustrated…

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