Metacomputing with Federated Method Invocation

Six generations of RPC systems can be distinguished including Federated Method Invocation (FMI) presented in this paper. Some of them—CORBA, Java RMI, and Web/Globus services—support distributed objects. However, creating object wrappers implementing remote interfaces doesn’t have a great deal to do with object-oriented distributed programming. Distributed objects developed that way are usually ill-structured with missing core objectoriented traits: encapsulation, instantiation, inheritance, and network-centric messaging by ignoring the real nature of networking. A distributed system is not just a collection of distributed objects—it’s the network of objects. In particular, the object wrapping approach does not help to cope with network-centric messaging, invocation latency, object discovery, dynamic object federation, fault detection, recovery, partial failure, etc. The JiniTM architecture does not hide the network; it allows the programmer to deal with the network reality: leases for network resources, distributed events, transactions, and discovery/join protocols to form federations. A service-oriented architecture presented in this paper implements FMI to support metaprogramming. The triple Command pattern implantation uses Jini service management and Rio dynamic provisioning for managing the network of FMI objects.