Dissection of the internal workings of the RMI, possible enhancements and implementing authentication in standard Java RMI

Abstract

The Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) is a well-known solution for remote method call. However, the standard Java RMI lacks features like service availability, load sharing, authentication and authorisation of client, data security and asynchronous communication, which are desirable in any enterprise distributed application. To enhance or add any new functionality in the RMI runtime, a detailed study of its internal workings is required. We debug and analyse RMI programs to understand the internal workings of the RMI architecture. We present the components involved and their responsibilities, detailed internal communication process and feasible enhancements at different layers of the RMI architecture. We compare the RMI with other distributed computing technologies like Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and web services. We also discuss possible enhancements in the RMI runtime, which could perfect it for a real enterprise application. As a proof of concept, we also discuss the implementation details of providing a client authentication functionality by modifying the RMI runtime. In addition to programmers, this contribution will also help the research community and the RMI runtime providers to enhance the RMI runtime.