Java Distributed Computing

What Does Java Provide?

The original design motivations behind Java and its predecessor, Oak, were concerned mainly with reliability, simplicity, and architecture neutrality. Subsequently, as the potential for Java as an “Internet programming language” was seen by its developers at Sun Microsystems, support for networking, security, and multithreaded operations was incorporated or improved. All of these features of the Java language and environment also make for a very powerful distributed application development environment. This is, of course, no accident. The requirements for developing an Internet-based application overlap to a great extent with those of distributed application development.

In this section, we review some of the features of Java that are of particular interest in distributed applications, and how they help to address some of the issues described in the previous section.

Object-Oriented Environment

Java is a “pure” object-oriented language, in the sense that the smallest programmatic building block is a class. A data structure or function cannot exist or be accessed at runtime except as an element of a class definition. This results in a well-defined, structured programming environment in which all domain concepts and operations are mapped into class representations and transactions between them. This is advantageous for systems development in general, but also has benefits specifically for you as the distributed system developer. An object, as an instance of ...