Efficient Implementation of Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI)

Java and the Remote Method Invocation (RMI) mechanism supported by it make it easy to build distributed applications and services in a heterogeneous environment. When the applications are interactive and require low response time, e cient implementations of RMI are needed. We explore both transport level protocols as well as object caching in the RMI framework to meet the performance requirements of interactive applications. We have developed a prototype system that o ers new transport protocols and allows objects to be cached at client nodes. We describe the design issues and the implementation choices made in the prototype along with some preliminary performance results.