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 here 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.