Who should attend: Programmers and developers who understand Java programming basics and are familiar with distributed systems.

What you will learn: An understanding of the basic mechanisms used in Java RMI, why the system was designed the way it was, and how to design your own RMI-based applications.

One of the major enhancements added to Java at the 1.1 release is the Remote Method Invocation (RMI) facility. RMI allows calls to be made between Java objects in different virtual machines, perhaps on different physical machines. Unlike most previous distributed computing infrastructures, RMI was designed to be language-centric. This allows RMI programming to be done entirely in Java, utilizing such language features as the rich Java type system and garbage collection. Coupled with the code portability of the Java platform, this language specificity simplifies distributed programming and also allows the passing of objects by value as well as by reference.

This course will introduce the design of RMI, and show how to build distributed applications using the facility. It will be divided between theory and practice, and will include discussions of the garbage collection mechanisms, code loading and polymorphism in distributed systems, as well as working through a number of examples of actual code implementing RMI-based distributed programs.

Jim Waldo is a senior staff engineer with JavaSoft, where he is responsible for the overall architecture of pure Java distributed systems. Prior to joining JavaSoft, he was principle investigator for the large-scale distribution project in Sun Microsystems Laboratories. He has worked on object-oriented distributed systems for over a decade, and was one of the lead architects of the original CORBA specification.

Ann Wollrath is a staff engineer with JavaSoft, where she is the lead designer and project lead of the Java Remote Method Invocation system. Prior to joining JavaSoft, she did research in reliable, large-scale distributed systems in Sun Microsystems Laboratories and in parallel computation at MITRE Corporation.

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