Re: Export once, deserialize on subsequent restarts

> Ok, this should be simple to do but I can't seem to figure it out.
>
> NOTE: I do not want to use RMID, ActivatableRef, or JINI.
>
> All I want to do is export a stub for a server the first time it starts,
> send that server's stub to a client, and have that client can keep a
> persistent reference to it. Serializing the stub is easy on the client
> side. It's the serialization on the server side that is tricky since I
> don't know how to deserialize it in a way that it gets the same object
> table id.
>
> So to restate, what I can't figure out how to do (without RMID
> activation stuff) is to generate a stub once, serialize it locally, and
> then on subsequent restarts, use the same serialized stub so that it
> always has the same id in the object table.

The J2SE RMI API just doesn't provide a direct way to do this (export
a remote object so that it can be invoked through a previous-persisted
reference) other than with activation.  (Jini ERI supports this in
that a specific object ID can be passed to the BasicJeriExporter
constructor.)  One indirect approach would be to wrap the remote stub
in your own kind of faulting reference, similar to ActivatableRef or
net.jini.activation.ActivatbleInvocationHandler (more the latter,
because a dynamic proxy would clearly be convenient here), that
performs some sort of lookup operation (perhaps starting with a
registry lookup) when the underlying stub seems to be stale, to try to
obtain a fresh copy.

> I see RemoteProxy.getStub takes an ID as a parameter, but it is in
> sun.rmi.*, is this class present on all JVM implementations? Am I on
> the right track?

It is indeed possible to do this with sun.rmi.* APIs, but the
resulting solution would not be portable across J2SE implementations.
Case in point: sun.rmi.server.RemoteProxy does not exist in Sun's JDK
5.0 implementation.  If you're looking down that avenue despite all
the caveats[*], I would suggest looking at what
sun.rmi.registry.RegistryImpl does on construction for hints, as it
also needs to export with a fixed object ID.

-- Peter

[*] http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/faq/faq-sun-packages.html

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