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RMI books hit the shelves

Learn RMI with a book that suits your programming needs

By Gregg Sporar, JavaWorld.com, 10/12/01

Until recently, if you wanted up-to-date information about Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI), you had to piece together information from magazines, tutorials, and mailing lists. A few Java books provided a chapter or two devoted to RMI, but those were only intended as introductions. After a long dry spell, two new books devoted to RMI were published this year. In this article, I'll review both of them:

• Mastering RMI: Developing Enterprise Applications in Java and EJB, Rickard Öberg (John Wiley & Sons)
• Java.rmi: The Remote Method Invocation Guide, Esmond Pitt and Kathleen McNiff (Addison-Wesley)

The table below provides a quick review of the books' main characteristics. The first three rows are the administrative details. The remaining rows rate each book's coverage of different RMI topics.

RMI books overview
Title	Mastering RMI	Java.rmi
Price	9.99	9.99
Total pages	305	284
CD-ROM/Companion Website	Yes / Yes	No / Yes
Basic RMI	Good	Good
Serialization	Good	Excellent
Naming services	Good	Average
Threading issues	Excellent	Good
Exceptions	Average	Excellent
Dynamic classloading	Excellent	Excellent
Sockets	Good	Good
Activation	Average	Average
RMI over IIOP	None	Excellent
Jini	Excellent	None
Security	Average	Good
Firewalls	None	Excellent
Agents	Good	Average
Basic EJB	Good	None
Scale: None, Poor, Average, Good, Excellent

Mastering RMI: Developing Enterprise Applications in Java and EJB

Rickard Öberg's Mastering RMI emphasizes instruction by example with a collection of tutorials that show and explain extensive sample code. If you are new to RMI, the ample code is a big plus because you can experiment with meaningful applications. The downside to the book's tutorial approach is that coverage of some topics spreads across more than one chapter.

Chapter 1 is an overview of client/server architectures. It provides introductory information on distributed computing and network protocols. Chapter 2 introduces RMI and then goes into its details. Öberg discusses the difference between the RMI specification and Sun's default implementation, which is based on the Java Remote Method Protocol (JRMP). He also introduces the threading model, marshalling, naming, and dynamic classloading, and then uses these concepts in Chapter 3 to describe a simple example application.

Chapter 4 improves that example application by using the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) and dynamic classloading. One of the book's strengths is that Öberg provides several examples on dynamic classloading, which is often difficult to configure in RMI. The chapter covers several dynamic classloading pitfalls in depth.

Chapters 5 and 6 contain topics optional for many RMI users. Chapter 5 describes custom socket factories while Chapter 6 covers activation. Unlike the first four chapters, I didn't feel I had mastered these subjects after reading their respective chapters. The sample code is well described, but I was left wondering which methods am I required to override when creating a custom socket factory? The information on activation likewise left me with the need to do further study before writing code that uses this RMI capability.

 

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