MultiCaR: Remote invocation for large scale, context-aware applications

Abstract

Remote Method Invocation (RMI) provides a powerful programming abstraction, well integrated with the object-oriented paradigm. Like conventional method calls, RMI interaction is point-to-point and uses an explicit address to determine the target of invocations. While natural and easy to use, these characteristics limit the applicability of RMI in large scale, dynamic scenarios. In this paper we present MultiCaR: a multicast extension to RMI, which provides a declarative addressing model that maximizes the decoupling among components, supporting a context-aware programming style that nicely fits dynamic scenarios. The set of guarantees provided by MultiCaR have been carefully defined to allow an efficient implementation of the model for large scale deployments. Finally, the MultiCaR prototype we developed exploits a content-based routing infrastructure to provide flexibility and scalability at the implementation level. We argue that these characteristics make MultiCaR a good candidate to develop large scale, object-oriented, dynamic applications, in the same way as content-based publish-subscribe has proved to support large scale, event-driven, dynamic applications.