Remote Method Invocation

Historically, networking has been concerned with two fundamental apps. The first app is moving files and data between hosts and is handled by FTP, SMTP, HTTP, NFS, IMAP, POP, and many other protocols. The second app is allowing one host to run programs on another host. This is the traditional province of Telnet, rlogin, Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and a lot of database middleware. Most of this tutorial has implicitly concerned itself with file and data transfer. Remote Method Invocation (RMI), however, is an example of the second app for networking: running a program on a remote host from a local machine. RMI is a core Java API and class library that allows Java programs running in one Java virtual machine to call methods in objects running in a different virtual machine, even when the two virtual machines are running on physically separate hosts. In essence, parts of a single Java program run on a local computer while other parts of the same program run on a remote host. RMI creates the illusion that this distributed program is running on one system with one memory space holding all the code and data used on either side of the actual physical connection.