Institute of Distributed Systems

FORMI

An extension for Java RMI to integrate Fragmented Objects

from 2003 to 2006

Persons

Principal Investigator

Researchers

  • Jörg Domaschka
  • Rüdiger Kapitza
  • Hans P. Reiser
  • Holger Schmidt

Students

  • Michael Kirstein
Funding

none

FORMI is a research project of the Institute of Distributed Systems. The name stands for "Fragmented Objects for RMI". FORMI is a Java library that allows programming with fragmented distributed objects in Java, similar to the capabilities of the CORBA-based Aspectix middleware. FORMI seamlessly integrates with Java RMI so that clients cannot distinguish FORMI objects from RMI objects. Object-specific fragment code can be loaded from the network.

Fragmented objects have object-specific code at client side. It can contain parts of a distributed object implementation, but does not have to. The object-internal communication between fragments remains hidden from clients. This allows transparent mechanisms for fault tolerance by switching between several server fragments, a peer-to-peer based communication infrastructure between equal fragments, etc.

Related Publications

2006

Kapitza, R., Domaschka, J., Hauck, F.J. and Reiser, H.P. 2006. FORMI: Integrating Adaptive Fragmented Objects into Java RMI. IEEE Distributed Systems Online. 7, 10 (Oct. 2006).

2005

Kapitza, R., Kirstein, M., Schmidt, H. and Hauck, F.J. 2005. FORMI: An RMI extension for adaptive applications. Proc. of the 4th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (Grenoble, France, 2005).