The Network Is The ComputerTM

JavaTM Is The Platform

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Real World Applications Using Java^TM RMI

If you are building applications or tools which use Java RMI and would like to be considered for the listing below, please send your information to rmi-marketing@panini.eng.sun.com

Below you will find a sample of customer experiences using Java RMI.

Customer Experiences with Java RMI:

• Avitek
• CEAS Consulting
• dynamicobjects corporation
• IBM
• Jyra Research Inc.
• RedCape Software
• Swiss Federal Supreme Court
• Webdevelopment Limited

Application

Application

CMSRemote is a utility class which forms the basis of distributed applets which operate with the Product Data Management (PDM) product CMS from Workgroup Technology Corporation (WTC). We use our utility class CMSRemote for building special purpose applications based on CMS for our clients. A description of CMS is in http://www.workgroup.com/cms.html.

Beside the obvious advantages of distributed processing, this library has the following features:

• Only one license is needed to service many users. Typically, one license per user is required, but the CMS API allows multiple users for one license.
  
• Start-up time is zero since the server using the single license is always running. Start-up time is approximately five seconds otherwise.
  
• CMS can be accessed from unsupported platforms if the platform is supported by a Java (RMI) capable browser.
  
• CMS can be accessed by a Network Computer. File operations such as checkout, getcopy, and checkin take place on the server filesystem.

Since an applet using RMI based on the CMSRemote class must be able to read and write files to transfer them to and from the server, the applet must be loaded from the client's local filesystem if local manipulation of the files is necessary. As more Java applications become available, local file storage an manipulation becomes less important.

Figure 1 gives an example of the ways in which the CMS Product Data System can be accessed by a variety of clients, thin and fat. CMS API methods are executed via RMI calls from applets running on the clients.

FIGURE 1. An Example of a Variety of Clients Being Served Data

The UNIX workstation and SPARCstation are running CAD/CAM applications which already exist. They require the ability to checkout and checkin engineering drawings in development, storing the files on the client for processing.

The PC-AT is an older model PC running a DOS-based Java browser. This syste has been resurrected from inactivity. It is used to view drawings stored in CMS, on shop floor or at a print counter. The browser running on that system has plug-ins compatible with the drawings being viewed.

or send e-mail to info@dynamicobjects.com

Application

perspectives is the first integrated document manager 100% compliant with Javasoft's JDK 1.1, RMI and the full JavaBeans model. A set of small and fast components offer a distributed-document centric, modular, extensible, platform-independent environment for workgroup collaboration and document creation.

What's in the package?

perspectives delivers a client/server solution that fits in any network and working environment. The current beta version includes common components such as a word processor, a draw application, a spreadsheet and a mail manager. A calendar, schedule manager and other information management applications will be included in the final version.

The perspectives RMI Server:

The perspectives server was written entirely in Java using JDK 1.1's RMI mechanism. RMI was the technology of choice because of its simplicity and inherent portability, and, coupled with the Delegation Event Model, it let us create an extensible collaboration framework that can be used even with proprietary components (if their interface provides the necessary hooks). RMI also provides a simple solution to distribute the processing of intensive tasks from the client to the server or among different servers.

perspectives includes a server that handles the following tasks in a distributed computing environment:

• Remote object editing capability
  
• Server-side processing for intensive tasks (like grammatical checking). This feature is not currently used by the client
  
• Supports the perspectives collaboration framework

The Server's Remote Object Editing support lets any program browse the server machine using remote interfaces. To simplify this task, the Server package also includes a remote file browser.

The perspectives collaboration framework uses the new delegation event model to propagate changes from the originator client to the server and from there to the other clients that are working on the same document. The next version of the server will use a Thread to buffer content changes and propagate updates at predefined intervals, thus completely separating local edition with collaboration and maintaining collaboration performance while providing a smooth user experience.

Our client/server scheme supports server-side processing for computing or memory-intensive tasks, such as grammatical checking), thus allowing to dynamically distribute the workload of an application.

Small Size + High Efficiency = perspectives

A good object-oriented design combined with JDK 1.1, RMI and JavaBeans technology let us deploy a complete set of programs in 10% of the space of other office suites in Java.

perspectives can be downloaded from http://www.dynamicobjects.com/license.html

You can obtain more information on perspectives sending e-mail to: perspectives@dynamicobjects.com

dynamicobjects is sponsored by InterSoft.

Application

Timely development of business-critical, customized applications is a major challenge for corporations today. The need to quickly respond to the changing business climate further compounds the often lengthy process of building and deploying new applications. Companies and their development partners need a way to speed this process to improve their productivity and overall competitiveness.

IBM's San Francisco Project addresses the needs of small and medium enterprises and independent solution providers for a faster application development solution. This IBM initiative, announced in August 1996, will provide a series of high-level application frameworks written in Java. First the Base layer provides a unified set of services for building with Java Distributed objects. Second, the Common Business Object layer provides a set of business objects common to a wide variety of business applications. Third, application frameworks provide domain-specific business function. The San Francisco Project enables business partners to focus less on the technology and more on unique solutions, to more easily develop business applications that can adapt to change, and to interoperate with applications developed by other partners.

The San Francisco Project will use Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) as the basis of the distribution infrastructure. We chose RMI because it fits fairly closely with the distribution requirements of this project. With distribution comes the need to manage and connect all the servers that will be doing the distributed work. Extensions are being made to RMI which will make it easier to manage and use the multiple server environment where the distributed objects will live. These extensions will provide the means for clients to connect with the distributed objects and will provide the mechanism for starting and stopping servers as well as other basic server management functions.

Examples of the extension areas include:

• exception handling
  
• distributed transaction management
  
• management of server processes

Application

Jyra Service Management Technology also enables service providers to offer their customers a monitored individual service profile for each user or application. This allows them to differentiate in a crowded market and, by providing exactly adequate performance to users, derive greater efficiencies from their own infrastructures.

Monitoring application performance across unknown Internet or Intranet links is the key to enabling mass market electronic commerce over the Internet. Jyra service level, or networked application performance monitoring allows for a commercial quality of service to be monitored by Internet or Extranet providers.

The Service Management Architecture is based on the use of a hierarchy of mobile agents. The entire architecture is implemented in Java.

It uses JavaSoft RMI for two purposes:

• Propagation of clones of the monitoring and reporting agents to remote managers. Each agent has a set of named properties, which includes a reference to the data channels to use for input data such as polling lists and output data such as summarized network reports.
  
  
• As the internal transport for data channels. The data channel area globally named and used. Internally, the channels are tabular. Each cell is a Java object. RMI gives us the simplicity to achieve this.

Application

Redcape Software, Inc. has developed a distributed Policy Framework that uses RMI as its primary means of communication between JVMs on the same and different hosts. Policies are long lived management agents designed to achieve business objectives. They communicate with User Interfaces (both in applications and applets), amongst themselves, and to appliances, such as backup servers, directly or through an appliance agent. Many of the Policies we have written to date will use Sun's Java Management API (JMAPI) Managed Objects and Agent Objects through RMI to achieve management objectives.

During the development of our Policy Framework we have dealt with issues such as bootstrapping, class loader interaction with RMI, using RMI with Netscape, and writing tunneling RMI socket factories to allow applets to talk securely with Remote Objects on any host.

Application

Framework for accessing the BASISplus textual DBMS from a Java application.

With the growth of the internet, the idea came to publish a part of those decisions through the internet. As the security was a major concern, we made a small analysis of the technologies that were existing at that time for accessing a database through a WWW client. The project started in the early 1996, in parallel with the expansion of the Java language. At that time, RMI was not out and a mandate was given to an external company for publishing the decisions through the CGI/Forms architecture.

But at the beginning of the year (1997), as we had again a little bit more time, we took a further look to the Java technologies. We then discovered the RMI API and decided to evaluate if that technology would allow us to access our BASISplus database from every kind of client. The RMI API acts as the " middleware " between the DBMS and our clients.

Using the JNI API, we've created a driver for accessing the BASISplus database from the Java language via the proprietary ABI of the DBMS. We called that class OpenAPI which is the " glue " that allows us to access the DBMS locally on the server. We then created, via the RMI API an object factory on the server side. A client, who wants to access the database connects to the factory object, which in turn creates a server object (client of the DBMS). Once it is created, the server object returns its reference to the factory object, that in turn sends it back to the client. The client is now able to dialog directly with the database through the dedicated server object. As BASISplus is not " multi-threaded safe ", each server object runs in it's own subprocess.

The main advantages of our framework to the standard CGI, NSAPI or servlets technologies are the followings :

• Each client has to authentificate to the database. With the other solutions, the authentification is normally made via one UID & PASSWORD that are stored on the HTTP server.
  

• Transactions are not restricted to one HTML document.
  

• True client/server applications can be deployed over the internet.

We created a small prototype of one part of the application that we developed at the Federal Supreme Court. We are using the Ada83 language with the Motif bindings for the GUI. With the Java Workshop environment and our RMI based framework we managed to write our prototype in 2 two days. With the Ada83/Motif environment we would need at least two weeks. And we wouldn't be able to run it from any other client than our VMS/Motif server...

Application

Java and RMI in our product development strategy:

Our core product Netsurface is a Java and RMI framework which supports business process, team working and information sharing within the corporate Intranet. The goal of the product is to provide a coherent and well structured operating environment for all business intranet users. Netsurface provides guidance for the users for mail and adhoc business processes such that "best practice" can be striven for whilst allowing flexibility and the facility for very rapid change to the companies strategy and operations.

The product offers a sophisticated and flexible framework for modelling entities and processes within the organization. It also supports these processes by tracking them in real time, providing a path for communication between the entities that comprise them, and allowing auditing and modelling/real world comparison. Allied to this is a highly intuitive graphical Java front end presenting business and process information as either a client application or delivered as an applet via the browser. Intranet and Internet content can be authored and published within Netsurface and a readership defined to provide structured and secure access to hypertext resources.

Netsurface also bridges the customers Intranet to their World Wide Web marketing activity. By linking the process flows of the Intranet with the marketing activity of the web the business can plan and operate sophisticated campaigns and promotions whilst developing "one to one" and focused marketing operations.

Architecturally, we have chosen RMI because we are using Java objects on client and server, and because of the small extra overhead for developing in a distributed environment. We have been using RMI since early alpha and have been through most of the early pitfalls and bugs and succeeded in producing a functioning system. We have also used JavaIDL and OrbixWeb to build early prototypes and have decided on RMI for market as well as technical reasons (backing JavaSoft's 100% pure Java strategy).

From the outset our systems design has been as "Beans compatible" as possible. At the heart of the Netsurface application an event service has been produced to control all sophisticated "server and client" interactions. Having based this event model on that of CORBA implementations and with Beans in mind we have developed a highly open system architecture. Persistence is handled by a data abstraction layer which is separate from the business objects layer and therefore independent of it. This allows us to separate out our transaction strategy, and to use differing underlying storage technologies (JDBC, Object Store etc.).

Netsurface is currently at Alpha release and will be launched as Beta in June '97. A Beta release partner program is currently being assembled - any interest in participation in this scheme should be directed to beta@netsurface.com . For general inquiries on Netsurface and other Webdevelopment products contact info@webdev.co.uk.

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