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3.1 Stubs and Skeletons

RMI uses a standard mechanism (employed in RPC systems) for communicating with remote objects: stubs and skeletons. A stub for a remote object acts as a client's local representative or proxy for the remote object. The caller invokes a method on the local stub which is responsible for carrying out the method call on the remote object. In RMI, a stub for a remote object implements the same set of remote interfaces that a remote object implements.

When a stub's method is invoked, it does the following:

• initiates a connection with the remote JVM containing the remote object,
• marshals (writes and transmits) the parameters to the remote JVM,
• waits for the result of the method invocation,
• unmarshals (reads) the return value or exception returned, and
• returns the value to the caller.

The stub hides the serialization of parameters and the network-level communication in order to present a simple invocation mechanism to the caller.

In the remote JVM, each remote object may have a corresponding skeleton (in Java 2 platform-only environments, skeletons are not required). The skeleton is responsible for dispatching the call to the actual remote object implementation. When a skeleton receives an incoming method invocation it does the following:

• unmarshals (reads) the parameters for the remote method,
• invokes the method on the actual remote object implementation, and
• marshals (writes and transmits) the result (return value or exception) to the caller.

In the Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition, v1.2 an additional stub protocol was introduced that eliminates the need for skeletons in Java 2 platform-only environments. Instead, generic code is used to carry out the duties performed by skeletons in JDK1.1. Stubs and skeletons are generated by the rmic compiler.