How to Implement a Protocol for Babel RMI

RMI support in Babel has two main goals: transparency & flexibility. Transparency meaning that the new RMI features are entirely transparent to existing Babelized code; flexibility meaning the RMI capability should also be flexible enough to support a variety of RMI transport implementations. Babel RMI is a big success in both areas. Babel RMI is completely transparent to already Babelized implementation code, allowing painless upgrade, and only very minor setup changes are required in client code to take advantage of RMI. The Babel RMI transport mechanism is also extremely flexible. Any protocol that implements Babel's minimal, but complete, interface may be used as a Babel RMI protocol. The Babel RMI API allows users to select the best protocol and connection model for their application, whether that means a WebServices-like client-server model for use over a WAP, or a faster binary peer-to-peer protocol for use on different nodes in a leadership-class supercomputer. Users can even change protocols without recompiling their code. The goal of this paper is to give network researchers and protocol implementors the information they need to develop new protocols for Babel RMI. This paper will cover both the high-level interfaces in the Babel RMI API, and the low level details about how Babel RMI handles RMI objects