Java RMI contains a wealth of experience in designing and implementing Java's Remote Method Invocation. If you're a novice reader, you will quickly be brought up to speed on why RMI is such a powerful yet easy to use tool for distributed programming, while experts can gain valuable experience for constructing their own enterprise and distributed systems. With Java RMI, you'll learn tips and tricks for making your RMI code excel. The book also provides strategies for working with serialization, threading, the RMI registry, sockets and socket factories, activation, dynamic class downloading, HTTP tunneling, distributed garbage collection, JNDI, and CORBA. In short, a treasure trove of valuable RMI knowledge packed into one book.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 9 Ratings

A decent introduction to RMI - 2002-04-13
Reviewer Rating:
I bought this book a few days ago, and I'm satisfied with it.

If it's an introduction to RMI that you're looking for, then you will not regret your choice: the author gives a good overview of RMI and the related topics, like sockets, streams, serialization and threads. As a "side effect", sometimes this book is a bit off topic, especially during the long description of what threads are and how to use them.
I would have liked to read something more about RMI over IIOP.

It looked correct and clear in the explanation, and I must dissent from a previous reviewer:
1) the author does not write that java.io.File is not serializable, but that its serialization is not obvious and it explains why;
2) arrays are really not serializable because they do not implement the Serializable interface (just check the java API).

The book is not intended for the advanced RMI programmer: I think Java.RMI from AW (Pitt-McNiff) is more suited for this purpose.
In conclusion, not the best book about RMI, but a satisfactory introduction.

Excellent RMI and distributed computing wisdom - 2002-12-02
Reviewer Rating:
I personally have a very high opinion of the technical level
and presentation of this book. The author gives enough substance
to all RMI components as well as enough how-to information for
a typical TMI deployment. What I apperciated most however is
that it's replete with small pieces of wisdom on distributed
systems design (e.g., scalability) that were eye-opening. It
also illustrates the distributed way of thinking through teaching to ask the right question at design phase.
It's true that it talks about more than strict RMI but that's hardly a shortcoming.
The reader wanting to see onl RMI stuff will find his way by picking the right chapters (you can't miss them).
Overall, excellent technical depth, good job.

Cluttered and Too much unwanted material - 2002-11-12
Reviewer Rating:
Explanation is too cluttered and a lot of material is off topic(threads, sockets,..). On the other hand topics like the newer 1.2 Activation is not covered in detail. I felt "Java.rmi" book by Esmond Pitt to be a more useful resource.

Really nice book for distributed system developer. - 2002-04-15
Reviewer Rating:
The book is well organized from the basic technology to hgh level, deep technology. If someone wants to know RMI itself, this
book will be useless. But if someone really wants to know what distributed system is and how the distributed system is implemented using RMI, this book is very helpful.

Probably Outdated - 2008-07-16
Reviewer Rating:
RMI has evolved a lot from 2001, this book is rather outdated.

But I'll only comment on the serialization chapter (10).

It gives some bad advice for doing serialization (read Effective Java for that), and even has this passage, commenting on the internals of java.util.ArrayList, which is serializable, and has an internal Object[] field marked as "transient".

"But hidden in here is a huge problem: ArrayList is a generic container class whose state is stored as an array of objects. While arrays are first-class objects in Java, they aren't serializable objects."

That's the reason he thinks it is marked as transient. Well, serializing arrays worked from day 1 (depending on the element references being serializable themselves of course), and this just reveals a big misunderstandment on the author's part about the code he read. (Surely enough, an ArrayList's internal array can be far bigger than its actual contents, so it would be a bad idea to depend on default serialization for this field).

This sort of stuff just doesn't boost my trust.

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