Chapter 25
Remote Method Invocation
So far most of the Java programs in this tutorial have been running in one JVM. There were two exceptions: In Lesson 18 you used two JVMs while learning about socket programming, and your JDBC programs from Lesson 22 communicated with another JVM running database server. The application running on the user’s computer isn’t always allowed to access remote data directly — that’s one of the reasons distributed Java applications came into the picture. (The word distributed means having parts of the applications running on several computers.) The other reason was to provide a centralized server catering to multiple lightweight clients.
There are lots of ways to create Java distributed applications that run on more than one JVM, and Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is one of them even though it’s being used seldom these days. For example, a client Java application (JVM1) connects to a server Java application (JVM2), which connects to the DBMS that runs on a third computer. The client application knows nothing about the DBMS; it gets the data, an ArrayList of Employee objects, from the server’s application that runs in JVM2. RMI uses object serialization for the data exchange between JVM1 and JVM2.
But unlike with socket programming, where the client explicitly connects to the server, with RMI one Java class can invoke methods on Java objects that live in another (remote) JVM. Although from a syntax perspective it looks as if the caller and the server’s ...
