Remote Batch Invocation for Compositional Object Services

Because Remote Procedure Calls do not compose efficiently, designers of distributed object systems use Data Transfer and Remote Façade patterns to create large-granularity interfaces, hard-coded for particular client use cases. As an alternative to RPC-based distributed objects, this paper presents Remote Batch Invocation (RBI), language support for explicit client-defined batches. A Remote Batch statement combines remote and local execution: all the remote code is executed in a single round-trip to the server, where all data sent to the server and results from the batch are communicated in bulk. RBI supports remote blocks, iteration and conditionals, and local handling of remote exceptions. RBI is efficient even for fine-grained interfaces, eliminating the need for hand-optimized server interfaces. We demonstrate RBI with an extension to Java, using RMI internally as the transport layer. RBI supports large-granularity, stateless server interactions, characteristic of service-oriented computing.