1.2 System Goals

The goals for supporting distributed objects in the Java programming language are:

• Support seamless remote invocation on objects in different virtual machines
• Support callbacks from servers to applets
• Integrate the distributed object model into the Java programming language in a natural way while retaining most of the Java programming language's object semantics
• Make differences between the distributed object model and local Java platform's object model apparent
• Make writing reliable distributed applications as simple as possible
• Preserve the type-safety provided by the Java platform's runtime environment
• Support various reference semantics for remote objects; for example live (nonpersistent) references, persistent references, and lazy activation
• Maintain the safe environment of the Java platform provided by security managers and class loaders

Underlying all these goals is a general requirement that the RMI model be both simple (easy to use) and natural (fits well in the language).

The first two chapters in this specification describe the distributed object model for the Java programming language and the system overview. The remaining chapters describe the RMI client and server visible APIs which are part of the Java 2 platform.