In this book, I will focus on Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) framework. RMI is a robust
and effective way to build distributed applications in which all the participating programs are
written in Java. Because the designers of RMI assumed that all the participating programs would
be written in Java, RMI is a surprisingly simple and easy framework to use. Not only is RMI useful
for building distributed applications, it is an ideal environment for Java programmers learning how
to build a distributed application.
I don't assume you know anything about distributed programs or computer networking. We'll start
from the ground up and cover all the concepts, classes, and ideas underlying RMI. I will also
cover some of the more advanced aspects of Java programming; it would be irresponsible to
write a book on RMI without devoting some space to topics such as sockets and threading.
In order to get the most out of this book, you will need a certain amount of experience with the
Java programming language. You should be comfortable programming in Java; you should have
a system with which you can experiment with the code examples (like many things, distributed
programming is best learned by doing); you should be fairly comfortable with the basics of the
JDK 1.1 event model (in particular, many of the code examples are action listeners that have
been added to a button); and you should be willing to make mistakes along the way.
About This Book
This book covers an enormous amount of ground, starting with streams and sockets and working
its way through the basics of building scalable client-server architectures using RMI.
While the order of chapters is a reasonable one, and one that has served me well in introducing
RMI to my students at U.C. Berkeley Extension, it is nonetheless the case that skipping around
can sometimes be beneficial. For example, Chapter 10, which discusses object serialization,
really relies only on streams (from Chapter 1) and can profitably be read immediately after
Chapter 4 (where the first RMI application is introduced).
The book is divided into three sections. Part I starts with an introduction to some of the essential
background material for RMI. After presenting the basics of Java's stream and socket libraries,
we build a simple socket-based distributed application and then rebuild this application using
RMI. At this point, we've actually covered most of the basics of building a simple RMI application.
The rest of Part I (Chapters Chapter 5 through Chapter 9) presents a fairly detailed analysis of
how introducing a network changes the various aspects of application design. These chapters
culminate in a set of principles for partitioning an application into clients and servers and for
designing client-server interaction. Additionally, they introduce an example from banking which is
referred to repeatedly in the remainder of the book. After finishing the first section, you will be
able to design and build simple RMI applications that, while not particularly scalable or robust,
can be used in a variety of situations.
Part II builds on the first by drilling down on the underlying technologies and discussing the
implementation decisions that must be made in order to build scalable and secure distributed
applications. That is, the first section focuses on the design issues associated with the client-
server boundary, and the second section discusses how to make the server scale. As such, this
section is less about RMI, or the network interface, and more about how to use the underlying
Java technologies (e.g., how to use threads). These chapters can be tough sledding™ this is the
technical heart of the book.
Part III consists of a set of independent chapters discussing various advanced features of RMI.
The distinction between the second and third sections is that everything covered in the second
section is essential material for building a sophisticated RMI application (and hence should be at
least partially understood by any programmer involved in the design or implementation of an RMI
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xwy_1232013-12-18讲解很详细 对初学很有帮助
