4. Conclusion

During the course of this report we have taken a comparative look at the RMI mechanism. This has revealed some important advantages that RMI possess over its more traditional counterparts:

· Greater range of data types can passed (primitives, objects, images etc);
· Executing remote functions is almost like executing a local functions;

Despite the benefits offered by RMI, its use is restricted to only java-to-java communications. A problem further exacerbated by its incompatibility with the industry standard remote invocation mechanism, Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). This problem is to be solved in the future with the development of RMI-CORBA. This mechanism utilises the positives of RMI and CORBA to produce a feature rich mechanism that can be used to communicate processes on remote systems using different implementation languages.

Overall the RMI mechanism is a highly practical solution to remote computing and its popularity is due to increase with the release of the RMI-CORBA mechanism.

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