This book is intended for Java developers who want to build distributed applications. By a distributed application, I mean a set of programs running in different processes (and quite possibly on different machines) which form, from the point of view of the end user, a single application. [1] The latest version of the Java platform, Java 2 (and the associated standard extension libraries), includes extensive support for building distributed applications.

In this book, I will focus on Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) framework. RMI is a robust and effective way to build distributed applications in which all the participating programs are written in Java. Because the designers of RMI assumed that all the participating programs would be written in Java, RMI is a surprisingly simple and easy framework to use. Not only is RMI useful for building distributed applications, it is an ideal environment for Java programmers learning how to build a distributed application.