Who should attend: Java developers interested in serious exploration of the options available for building distributed Java programs. Some Java programming experience is required, and familiarity with RMI, CORBA, Voyager or a similar framework would be useful. The tutorial will be of particular interest to developers who are finding limitations in tiered static architectures, and want to explore "collaborative computing" alternatives in Java.

This tutorial explores a number of different mechanisms available to the Java developer for building distributed programs. These include the java.net socket communication primitives, RMI, Java/CORBA, JSDT, ObjectSpace Voyager and SoftWired iBus. These technologies are examined in the context of contrasting two primary styles for building large-scale systems: tiered and collaborative architectures.

Tiered systems are very much in vogue today, and are characterized by three-tier systems with graphical clients, mid-tier transactional application servers and back-end data resources. The object paradigm, and Java in particular, have in recent years been wedded to this model in the form of things like object transaction managers, Java application servers and Enterprise Java Beans. These are themselves typically built upon request/response communication primitives such as CORBA/IIOP, HTTP, RMI and JDBC.

Collaborative architectures, in contrast, do not restrict objects to reside on fixed layers of a system, but rather are composed of ad-hoc groups of distributed objects which compose together at runtime. They frequently build upon message-passing communication primitives, and often upon multicast communications. Java is particularly well suited for collaborative computing due to its native code mobility support. Java frameworks for collaborative computing, such as JSDT, Voyager Spaces and iBus are now commercially available, and offer real alternatives for system designers. The recent introduction of Jini indicates that collaborative Java computing is moving into the mainstream.

The tutorial demonstrates coded examples using each of the technologies, highlighting the features they each offer to support collaborative computing.