Asynchronous Remote Method Invocation (ARMI) mechanism for Java

Abstract

In the recent past, Java has emerged as a powerful and easy to use language for net-centric computing. Simplicity, object-oriented features, the presence of threads and architecture independence are the main reasons for the popularity of Java. Despite having built-in threads in the language, the bare Java execution model does not support remote object invocations. RMI (remote method invocation) is an interface specified by Sun Microsystems for the purpose of native Java–client and Java–server communication. Although RMI is simple to use, it is not desirable in many applications due to its synchronous nature. In this paper, we describe ARMI (asynchronous RMI), a mechanism which is built on top of RMI and allows concurrent execution of local and remote computations. This paper presents the salient features and implementation details of ARMI. Two experiments performed with ARMI along with performance comparisons to RMI are also explained. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.