Design networked
applications in
RMI using the Adapter design pattern
Tutorial Details:
Design networked applications in RMI using the Adapter design pattern
Design networked applications in RMI using the Adapter design pattern
By: By Dan Becker
A guide to correctly adapting local Java objects for the Web
f you use Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI), you know that it's easy to understand and implement: The perfect recipe for creating remote objects and services. In fact, Sun's Java tutorial provides an excellent example for creating your first RMI server and client and for running a remote system. However, I've seen many designs that build upon the Sun example and become unwieldy as new functions are added. Novice programmers often resort to odd naming conventions to distinguish local behavior from remote behavior, and, with the addition of new remote services, the remote class can easily grow into a big mess that performs poorly under remote network traffic.
In this article I'll demonstrate how the Adapter pattern, one of the most common design patterns, can be used to adapt a local class to a remote class. Using this design technique, it's easy to distinguish local from remote behavior, and you'll be able to continue to use the local class for your non-networked applications. Also, as the number of remote services grow, it's easy to see which class must handle the request and which objects must be synchronized. Finally, with this technique, your design will be easier to understand and more amenable to changes and fixes from multiple developers.
What is the Adapter pattern?
The Adapter pattern is one of the structural patterns listed in the reference book Design Patterns by the Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides). The Adapter pattern is very common not only to remote client/server programming but also to any situation in which you have one class that you wish to reuse, but the application interface doesn't match the class interface. For this reason, you use an adapter or wrapper to convert the application interface to the existing class interface. In software development, an adapter simply maps the interface of one class to that of another. Adapters are used continually throughout the software development process, hence the term Adapter pattern.
Figure 1, below, illustrates how an adapter works. In this diagram, Client wants to invoke the method request() in the Target interface. Since the Adaptee class has no request() method, it is the job of Adapter to convert the request to an available matching method. Here the Adapter converts the method request() call into the Adaptee method specificRequest() call. The Adapter does this conversion for each method that needs adapting, also known as wrappering.
Figure 1. Adapting an interface to an Adaptee class
This type of adapting is exactly what one needs when creating remote services for the Web. Think of the design process as taking a working local class and publishing its services for the Web. You publish the services not by adding to the local class, but by adapting the local class to the remote interface. In the following sections I'll show you how this is done.
Designing a networked application
As stated in the previous section, classes are best made Web-ready by adapting the local methods to a remote interface. Sun's Java tutorial tells us we have to follow certain steps to make RMI work. These steps are as follows:
Create a remote interface that extends the java.rmi.Remote interface
Provide an implementation of the remote interface
Invoke the remote method calls from the remote client
Serendipitously, these steps closely match the function of the Adapter pattern. The Adapter pattern is initiated when a remote client intends to use a method published in the remote interface. The remote interface extends the tagging interface java.rmi.Remote to let RMI know this interface implements RMI. Rather than forcing the local class to implement the remote method, which creates excessive class bloating and hurts performance and readability, one creates a remote adapter that services a remote method by invoking a similar method in the local class. The local class is unchanged and unaware that it's being adapted to service network requests. Figure 2 shows the relationships of the classes as you apply the Adapter pattern to RMI.
Figure 2. Adapting a Remote interface to a local class
Conceptually, we've created a picture of how we want to use the Adapter pattern in a Java RMI application. Now let's create a concrete implementation of this design. Let's assume we want to implement a remote collection that many remote clients can query or add and delete elements from over a network. For this example, I'll use the Hashtable class in the java.util package, which many Java programmers have used over and over again.
Design the local classes
The first step toward creating a remote collection is to design a local class that implements some function. Conveniently, Sun has created the java.util.Hashtable for us, and we'll use the class as-is with no extra function. I've omitted the synchronized keyword from the methods, but I will reintroduce it later when I discuss how to make the object thread-safe. For your convenience, Listing 1 contains the pertinent methods of the Hashtable class.
int size();
boolean isEmpty();
boolean contains( Object value );
boolean containsKey( Object key );
Object get( Object key );
Object put( Object key, Object value );
Object remove( Object key );
void clear();
Enumeration keys();
Enumeration elements();
Listing 1. The java.util.Hashtable class methods
Design the remote interface
The second step in this exercise is to create a remote interface that takes the services the remote class is offering and publishes them over the network. The interface RemoteMap , shown below, is based on the java.util.Map collection interface, which the hashtable implements in Java 2. Collectively, these methods form the interface that remote clients may call on our networked hashtable.
public interface RemoteMap extends java.rmi.Remote {
// Constants
public static final String SERVICENAME = "RemoteMap";
public int size() throws RemoteException;
public boolean isEmpty() throws RemoteException;
public boolean containsKey( Object key ) throws RemoteException;
public boolean containsValue( Object value ) throws RemoteException;
public Object get( Object key ) throws RemoteException;
public Object put( Object key, Object value ) throws RemoteException;
public Object remove( Object key ) throws RemoteException;
public void clear() throws RemoteException;
}
Listing 2. A RemoteMap interface: Our remote methods
There are a few details worth pointing out. To start with, all of the remote methods throw a java.rmi.RemoteException . This is nothing to worry about; it's simply a requirement of Java RMI. Also, the RemoteMap interface extends the java.rmi.Remote interface. This is a tagging interface that tells the Java rmic utility which interface is going to be shared over the network; this is another requirement of RMI. I've left out a few of the Map interface methods, such as keySet and valueSet , but these are easy to implement using the hashtable keys and elements enumerations. Finally, there is one constant in the interface -- the string SERVICENAME . This constant will be handy when servers publish an RMI service and clients query the RMI registry to find the name of our public services.
So, now we have a local object and a remote interface. We're now ready to adapt the local class to the remote interface.
Pitfalls of adaptation
Many designers fail to properly execute the next step, adapting the local class to the remote interface. It's tempting to create a new class that extends the java.util.Hashtable class and implements the RemoteMap interface (for example, RemoteHashtable ). This is a bad programming choice for several reasons:
It's preferable to design using composition rather than inheritance. Why? Because design by inheritance is normally used for adding new methods and attributes to an existing class. Here, we're simply adapting local methods to become remote methods, so design by composition and delegation is more appropriate.
Designing with inheritance uses up the single inheritance parent class. Since Java only allows single inheritance, this gives us the dubious choice of extending java.rmi.server.UnicastRemoteObject , as required by RMI, or extending java.util.Hashtable , as required when designing by inheritance. It's preferable to forgo design by inheritance and implement the RMI function.
Some local classes are final and may not be extended. For example, this design exercise won't work with the java.util.Vector class because that class is final. If a class is final, you cannot use design by inheritance.
Mixing local and remote functions overly complicates the class. This is especially problematic when the remote interface and the local class have similar method names. I've seen supposed solutions where programmers have changed the method names to help prevent this problem -- for example, sizeLocal and sizeRemote . This is ugly! Not to mention that two simple, single-function classes now become one big multifunction class. Even uglier!
To show you how easy it is to create an adapter, and how simple is its function, Listing 3 offers the entire code. Java RMI handles the marshalling and unmarshalling of all call parameters and return values as long as these objects are serializable and implement java.io.Serializable . So, you see, the adapter really is a very simple class, and we haven't made one change to our local implementation, the hashtable.
public class RemoteMapAdapter extends UnicastRemoteObject
implements RemoteMap {
// Constructors
// The owner publishes this service in the RMI registry.
public RemoteMapAdapter( Hashtable adaptee ) throws RemoteException {
this.adaptee = adaptee;
}
// RemoteMap role
public int size() throws RemoteException
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