Jini™ Specifications, The, Second Edition

A.4. Local and Distributed Computing

The major differences between local and distributed computing concern the areas of latency, memory access, partial failure, and concurrency.^[1] The difference in latency is the most obvious, but in many ways is the least fundamental. The often overlooked differences concerning memory access, partial failure, and concurrency are far more difficult to explain away, and the differences concerning partial failure and concurrency make unifying the local and remote computing models impossible without making unacceptable compromises.

^[1] We are not the first to notice these differences; indeed, they are clearly stated in [12].

A.4.1. Latency

The most obvious difference between a local object invocation and the invocation ...