Federated Method Invocation with Exertions

Six generations of RPC systems can be distinguished including Federated Method Invocation (FMI) presented in this paper. Some of them— CORBA, Java RMI, and Web/OGSA services—support distributed objects. However, creating object wrappers implementing remote interfaces doesn’t have a great deal to do with object-oriented distributed programming. Distributed objects developed that way are usually ill-structured with missing core object-oriented traits: encapsulation, instantiation, inheritance, and network-centric messaging by ignoring the real nature of networking. A distributed system is not just a collection of distributed objects—it’s the network of dynamic objects. In particular, the object wrapping approach does not help to cope with network-centric messaging, invocation latency, object discovery, dynamic object federations, fault detection, recovery, partial failure, etc. The JiniTM architecture does not hide the network; it allows the programmer to deal with the network reality: leases for network resources, distributed events, transactions, and discovery/join protocols to form service federations. An exertion-based architecture presented in this paper implements FMI to support service-oriented metaprogramming. The new triple Command pattern architecture presented in this paper uses Jini service management for managing the network of FMI objects.