J2EE™ Security for Servlets, EJBs and Web Services: Applying Theory and Standards to Practice

RMI Over SSL

Socket-based programming is powerful but quite low-level for developing distributed Java applications. Most often, a programming paradigm based on a client program directly invoking methods on objects within a server program, passing input objects as arguments and getting output objects as return values, is more suitable. Java RMI is one such paradigm.

In its simplest form, an RMI server is a unicast server—meaning it supports point-to-point communication as opposed to broadcast or multicast. It lives within a running process and communicates with clients through sockets, the default being TCP sockets. Programmatically, one creates a unicast server class by subclassing the class java.rmi.server.UnicastRemoteObject. Such a class gets ...