RMI

• Distributed Systems: running programs in different hosts (address spaces) that communicate
• Sockets: basic communication mechanism; needs protocols for exchanged message encoding and decoding (in clients and servers); error prone; cumbersome design
• Remote Procedure Call (RPC): easier than sockets; uses external data representation for parameters passed and returned values
• Distributed Object Systems: need to deal with communication between program level objects in different address spaces
• Remote Method Invocation (RMI): uses local surrogate object (stub) to manages remote object invocation (via rmiregistry and remote interfaces)