I can't figure out if the inability to get Java RMI applications working reliably is because it is obsolete, and no one much cares about it anymore, or if it is obsolete because it was so hard to get working reliably. It was certainly elegant on paper.
Elegant on paper?
ReplyDeleteWell, so was Ada.
Both? I've never used it, but a quick glance shows the designers had too much from the Microsoft mentality -- using OO to create complexity rather than to control/hide it?
ReplyDeleteSo was Ada?
ReplyDeleteSo far as I know, it's still being used in flight software (got this from a current employee of one of the big defense contractors: his own work, on the test data and analysis side, is all C/C++ and the like, but he says the actual avionics is largely Ada.)
RMI isn't bad by way of comparison with CORBA, its main competitor. CORBA does a lot more--multiple language bindings, more features, etc--but it's also got more twiddly knobs.
ReplyDeleteBasically everyone decided that message passing was a more plausible way to do most distributed computing in business applications than remote objects. Shove around a bunch of XML or JSON that describes what you want to do, basically, or use JMS to send around text messages.