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JDK Contents

RMI and Object Serialization

JDK 1.1 Release Notes

These release notes contain the following sections:

RMI General Notes

  1. Two examples illustrate the use of the RMI APIs. The first is a distributed version of Hello World, which has an accompanying Getting Started tutorial that explains the basics of using RMI. The second example is a stock monitoring applet that receives notification when the values of the portfolio change and that demonstrates callbacks from an object exported by the applet.

  2. Applets developed with the JDK 1.1 release of RMI can be run in the appletviewer and HotJava 1.0. Full support in all Java enabled browsers will be available when each Java licensee incorporates the JDK 1.1 release. In the interim, RMI on JDK 1.0.2 has a Netscape plug-in that allows RMI based applets to be run in Nescape 3.01.

Serialization General Notes

  1. Objects must explicitly declare that they can be written to an ObjectOutputStream by implementing either the interface java.io.Serializable or the interface java.io.Externalizable. Many of the core classes implement the Serializable interface.

  2. Objects implementing the interface java.io.Externalizable must implement the writeExternal method to save the entire state of the object and the readExternal method to restore the entire state of the object.

  3. To support versioning of classes, each version of a class except the first must specify the SerialVersionUID variable. This variable indicates the original class version for which the current class is capable of writing or reading streams. For example: static final long serialVersionUID = 3487495895819393L;

    To obtain this value, use the method ObjectStreamClass.getSerialVersionUID or the serialver tool.

RMI through Firewalls via a CGI Program (required under limited conditions)

For a server to support RMI calls from clients behind firewalls that do not foward HTTP requests to arbitrary ports, a CGI program needs to be installed on the server host's default HTTP server (listening on port 80). (Without installion of the CGI program, the server will still support RMI calls from clients behind typical firewalls.)

The CGI program "java-rmi.cgi" is responsible for forwarding HTTP-packaged RMI calls sent to the default HTTP server to be forwarded to an RMI server listening on a port specified in the URL. Specifically, when a POST request is sent with the URL path "/cgi-bin/java-rmi.cgi?forward=", the body of the request will be sent (as another POST request) to the server listening on the specified port (must be >= 1024). The HTTP response from this forwarded request will be the response to the original request.

On Solaris:

In the JDK release, copy the file bin/java-rmi.cgi to the directory to which your HTTP server maps the URL path "/cgi-bin". You will need to edit this script to fill in the proper path for the Java interpreter on the host machine, as noted in the script comments.

On Windows 95/NT:

In the JDK release, copy the file bin/java-rmi.cgi to the directory to which your HTTP server maps the URL path "/cgi-bin". For this program to execute correctly, the system PATH environment variable must include the directory for the Java interpreter.

Known Limitations and Bugs


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