What Is Remote Method Invocation (RMI)?

What can I say? I'm the kind of guy who likes to keep things local. I'm talking about remote method invocation (RMI). It's a distributed object technology developed by Sun for the Java programming language, and it's available as part of the Java application programming interface (API) and what does that mean for you? You can run your code across multiple computers on a network! Yup. That's right—you can use one computer to run numerous applications simultaneously! So, what does this mean for me? Well, let's take an example. Say you want to write a program that keeps track of all the different books in your library. You could write one program and then run it on every computer in your library so each one could keep track of its book collection or, if you had enough computers, you could use RMI so each computer would only need one copy of your program running on it—and then they'll all be able to help each other out! Now let's say that there are 100 computers in your library. If every single one of them is running 100 copies of your program, it will take up 1,000 total megabytes of space on their hard drives—which isn't very RMI permits Java methods to refer to a remote object and invoke methods of the remote object. The remote object may reside on another Java virtual machine, the same host, or on entirely different network hosts.RMI marshals and unmarshals method arguments through object serialization, which means that no matter where the method is executed—on another computer or even in another country—the data will be accessible. RMI also supports the dynamic downloading of class files across networks, so if you need additional functionality for your program, you can easily download it!