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An alternative to sockets is Remote Procedure Call (RPC), which abstracts the communication interface to the level of a procedure call. Instead of working directly with sockets, the programmer has the illusion of calling a local procedure, when in fact the arguments of the call are packaged up and shipped off to the remote target of the call. RPC systems encode arguments and return values using an external data representation, such as XDR.
RPC, however, does not translate well into distributed object systems, where communication between program-level objects residing in different address spaces is needed. In order to match the semantics of object invocation, distributed object systems require remote method invocation or RMI. In such systems, a local surrogate (stub) object manages the invocation on a remote object.
The Java platform's remote method invocation system described in this specification has been specifically designed to operate in the Java application environment. The Java programming language's RMI system assumes the homogeneous environment of the Java virtual machine (JVM), and the system can therefore take advantage of the Java platform's object model whenever possible.
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