| Before the Java language was available, distributed systems engineering was greatly concerned with the problem of heterogeneity—the differences between CPUs, OSes, languages, and data formats. The challenge was to create architectureneutral formats and protocols which could be adapted to any architecture without burdening the programmer. RPC and CORBA IIOP represent two such approaches.
After the Java language was mooted as a universal language, an interesting question was raised: how could a distributed system design be simplified by the assumption that every host is Javacapable? The Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) API is at once a working demonstration of the answer and a popular tool for building realworld Javabased distributed systems.
The Java RMI API was originally designed by Ann Wollrath, Roger Riggs, and Jim Waldo at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, East Coast Division. It was designed with the twin aims of simplicity (ease of use) and naturalness (being a good fit with the language). |
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