Curating Contemporary Music Festivals: 2.1 Introduction

NRMI This chapter presents Natural Remote Method Invocation (NRMI): a middleware mechanism that provides a fully-general implementation of call-by-copy-restore semantics for arbitrary linked data structures, used as parameters in remote procedure calls. As a parameter passing semantics, call-by-copy-restore is more natural than traditional call-by-copy, enabling remote calls to behave much like local calls. We discuss in depth the effects of calling semantics for middleware, present scenarios in which NRMI is more convenient to use than regular Java RMI, and describe three efficient implementations of call-by-copy-restore middleware, showing how the lessons of NRMI are reusable in different settings. Remote Procedure Call (RPC) [10] is one of the most widespread paradigms for distributed middleware. The goal of RPC middleware is to provide an interface for remote services that is as convenient to use as local calls. RPC middleware with call-by-copy-restore semantics has been often advocated in the literature, as it offers a good approximation of local execution (call-by-reference) semantics, without sacrificing performance. Nevertheless , call-by-copy-restore middleware is not often used to handle arbitrary linked data structures , such as lists, graphs, trees, hash tables, or even non-recursive structures such as a " customer " object with pointers to separate " address " and " company " objects. This is a