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Babel RMI Concepts

For normal function calls, arguments are passed by initializing registers and pushing things onto the system stack. In RMI, function arguments and return values are passed by a network protocal. From a programmers point of view, the only difference between normal and network function calls is that network function calls have more failure modes. Anything that can disturb a network connection, such as a router going offline, can cause a RMI call to fail.

Conceptually, the RMI view of the world can be thought of as 1 or more Babel Object Servers (BOSs) that a client can connect to in order to create or use objects on those servers. Of course, any server can also connect as a client to any other server, and any client can become a server simply by starting up a BOS of it's own.

This makes Babel RMI very flexible, and accepting of whatever client-server relationships the application writers choose to use. Web Services users of Babel tend to use traditional client-server models, while scientific distributed systems users tend toward peer-to-peer usage.



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users_guide Last Modified 2006-07-21

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