Extending RMI to support dynamic reconfiguration of distributed systems

By using dynamic reconfiguration, the flexibility, adaptability, and extensibility of distributed systems are enhanced. Treating interactions among components during dynamic reconfiguration is still one of the most crucial problems in this research area. This challenge should be met by middleware design and development. However, current standard middleware offers little support for dynamic reconfiguration of distributed systems. In this paper, we describe an extended Java RMI that supports efficiently dynamic reconfiguration of distributed systems. This extended Java RMI can automatically monitor and manipulate invocations between components during dynamic reconfiguration. Moreover, the extended Java RMI can automatically switch invocations from remote to local and vice versa.