Flux remoting has always been a performance challenge due to the inherent nature of RMI technology. Accessing a flux engine across the firewall requires network ports to be opened and monitored. There are many pain points using RMI as it is generally resource intensive due to network object serialization. Furthermore, the RMI registry can be difficult to administer at times. Scalability and performance of RMI servers across networks has been a concern in a high-performance distributed computing.

We are capitalizing on the Web and its continued success in various forms. Providing HTTP transport for accessing remote engines across firewalls is a compelling solution for us. This approach provides more freedom to developers as well as network admins.

Beginning with the forthcoming Flux 8.0, we have replaced Flux's use of RMI by an HTTP transport. Developers are no longer required to code against remote exceptions. Flux engine methods previously threw flux.EngineException and java.rmi.RemoteException in their method signatures. Now these same methods just throw flux.EngineException. That's one less exception to handle.

By updating Flux remoting from RMI to an HTTP transport, Flux code is easier to write, understand, and maintain. Furthermore, network administration is simplified.