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Distributed systems involve not only clients and servers, but also remote
objects. Java provides good support for all of these areas:
- RMI is a higher-level API built on top of the Sockets interface
- RMI allows you not only to pass data among objects on different systems,
but also to invoke methods on a remote object.
- Remote objects can act as a client and/or a server, depending on the
requirements of what is being distributed.
- RMI goes beyond the normal concepts of a remote procedure call by
providing the ability to pass objects between clients and servers
There are also other technologies that support distributed objects, among
them:
- CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) supports calls among
distributed objects written in different languages.
- SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) supports web services, which
is a relatively hot topic at the time of writing.
We won't be talking about these other technologies; each of them could
be a course unto itself!
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