JavaSpaces™ Principles, Patterns, and Practice

2.6. Serialization and Its Effects

Each JavaSpace object is a local object that acts as a proxy to the remote space implementation—it is not a reference to a remote object. As a result, all space operations go through the intermediate proxy and then on to the remote space (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1. Entries are serialized by a local proxy object and transmitted and stored in the remote space in serialized form.

To transfer an entry to or from the remote space, the proxy makes use of serialization. Serialization provides a way to turn an object into a stream of bytes that can be stored in a file or transmitted over a network and later reconstituted ...