Remote Closures

a better RMI?

The discussion about closure support in Java is going on. Well, Groovy does have Closures and I like them much. But I asked myself a question: "What happens when I want to execute a closure on a remote VM?"

I answered myself, that that possibly would be a problem. If we use the normal serialization mechanisms, then we have bad luck, a Closures is not Serializable atm. Well, ok, that could be changed, but does it make sense? Usually a closure is a bit like a annonymous inner class. That means in case of RMI you don't have a stub as RMI would require. So maybe the real question is about how to make Groovy's closures Serializeable?

I had some nasty thoughts about somehow serializing the AST into the class, but then I recognized, that the original source might be good enough for that. And it doesn't bloat the class files which would have a bad effect on classloading time.

So I thought, maybe give them custom read and write methods for serializetion, where we transfer the source as well as the enviroment the closure closes around. This could do the job. But then the MetaClass needs to be serializeable as well.

No, I think if we are able to get the source for the closure, then why not sending this to the remote machine? We would put the source and state information of the closure in a wrapper object and when deserializing we reproduce our closure. We use ObjectStreams that know what to do with the closures and we somehow have to foist our custom streams upon RMI.

Or we don't use RMI at all. If we use the ObjectStreams directly we don't have any problems. I may have time in the future ot take a look at spring and it ability to use different remoting services. But thinking of how RMI is done, I always have the feeling that it is completly surplus. How would I implement Remote Method invocation? I need some kind of cahnnel, transfering the method message, that is name of the method, some kind of id for the object the call is made on and a serialized version of the parameters. On the other end, I need to use the id to lookup the goal object, I need to deserialize the arguments and then just make the call using a MetaClass. It is easy!!

I think I will try an example implementation the next days and keep you informed about the result. The nice thing is, we can use that from Java too, thx to the good integration of Groovy in Java!