Evaluation

RemoteJ has been designed as an alternative method of developing distributed applications to both the Java RMI convention, which requires developers to be aware of the distributed nature of their applications, and the RPC convention, which attempts to make remote procedure calls transparent to the developer.

Both of the above approaches result in applications tangled with the crosscutting concern distribution. Previous work, described in Section 3.8, has shown that an aspect-oriented approach can significantly reduce the tangling between application functionality and the distribution concern, thereby making programs easier to write and understand. However, this previous work has assumed a single protocol and has not considered the recovery concern thereby attempting, once again, to mask the difference between local and remote method calls.

We agree with Waldo et al. [118] that any attempt to paper over the differences between local and remote systems is fundamentally wrong, because distributed systems require that the programmer be aware of issues such as latency and partial failures to be able to support basic requirements of robustness and reliability