Mechanisms for object caching in distributed applications using Java RMI

Remote Method Invocation (RMI), a mechanism to access remote objects in Java-based distributed applications, uses network communication for each method invocation. Consequently, using RMI in a wide-area environment can cause poor application performance. One solution to improve performance is to cache the objects such that network communication is not necessary for each method invocation. In this paper, we present mechanisms to transparently add object caching to RMI. These mechanisms are compatible with existing RMI applications and use an event-based model to support different consistency policies. The mechanisms also include the ability to adaptively select the consistency policy for an object based on its usage pattern. A novel feature of our mechanisms is the use of a 'reduced object', which is a partial representation of the RMI object We experimentally evaluate and demonstrate the benefits of our mechanisms.