Course Content

Objectives
- Understand the principal of Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
- Understand the benefits and shortcomings of RMI relative to other technologies learned in this course.
- Implement and deploy Java application using RMI

Readings

- Overview of RMI Applications (Links to an external site.)

In this lesson, you should thoroughly read the Oracle documentation for RMI (Links to an external site.).

You should also complete the walkthrough exercise in that tutorial in order to prepare you for the Individual Assignment in this section.
Keep in mind that, although an understanding of RMI is critical for a comprehensive view of distributed-object computing, many of the other techniques that we have discussed in previous lessons are often considered preferable options to RMI.

One reason for this is that RMI requires that any clients and servers that will be communicating are all implemented in Java. This is a sharp contrast to the openness and compatibility of technologies such as web services (especially when designed in a RESTful manner). Additionally, modern tools for implementing RMI such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs - see link below) are often criticized for their excessive complexity.

Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs) (Links to an external site.)

Students with a strong appreciation of acronym soup should consider some (very optional) reading on implementing the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) using Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) using the Internet Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP) (Links to an external site.).

Although RMI can offer strong performance when it is acceptable to require Java to be running on both client and server, the openness of web services and REST is often preferable for modern applications.

Assignment:

After implementing the sample RMI program in the assigned reading/tutorial, create a simple remote calculator application based on the PI calculator in the tutorial. Your calculator should implement the following remote methods:
double add(double operand1, double operand2)
double subtract(double operand1, double operand2)
double multiply(double operand1, double operand2)
double divide(double operand1, double operand2)