Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Accessing Remote Objects as a Client

Now that we’ve defined a remote object interface and its server implementation, and generated the stub and skeleton classes that RMI uses to establish the link between the server object and the remote client, it’s time to look at how you make your remote objects available to remote clients.

The Registry and Naming Services

The first remote object reference in an RMI distributed application is typically obtained through the RMI registry facility and the Naming interface. Every host that wants to export remote references to local Java objects must be running an RMI registry daemon of some kind. A registry daemon listens (on a particular port) for requests from remote clients for references to objects served on that host. The standard Sun Java SDK distribution provides an RMI registry daemon, rmiregistry. This utility simply creates a Registry object that listens to a specified port and then goes into a wait loop, waiting for local processes to register objects with it or for clients to connect and look up RMI objects in its registry. You start the registry daemon by running the rmiregistry command, with an optional argument that specifies a port to listen to:

objhost% rmiregistry 5000 &

Without the port argument, the RMI registry daemon listens on port 1099. Typically, you run the registry daemon in the background (i.e., put an & at the end of the command on a Unix system or run start rmiregistry [ port ] in a DOS window on a Windows system), ...