Efficient RMI: dynamic specialization of object serialization

This paper describes a novel approach to object serialization in remote method invocation (RMI). Object serialization transforms objects´ representations between heterogeneous platforms. Efficient serialization is primary concern in RMI because the conventional approaches incur large runtime overheads. The approach described specializes a serializing routine dynamically according to a receiver´s platform, and this routine converts the sender´s in-memory representations of objects directly into the receiver´s in-memory representations. This approach simplifies the process of RMI: the receiver can access the passed objects immediately without any data copies and data conversions. A new platform can join the existing community of senders and receivers because a specialized routine for the platform is generated as needed. Experimental results show that significant performance gains are obtained by this approach. The prototype implementation of this approach was 1.9-3.0 times faster than Sun XDR, and the time needed for generating a specialized routine was only 0.6 msec