A new version (2.0.5) of the RMI Plug-in for Eclipse is available. The RMI Plugin aids in RMI development by generating the RMI stub and skeleton files, and offering debugging and configuration tools. The enhancements of the new version are:

• A console window is now attached to the RMI Registry process and (by default) it will show the exceptions thrown by the registry.
• It is now possible to provide additional (-J) arguments to the rmiregistry executable.
• RMI Spy now displays the number of elements in arrays that were passed as arguments in remote calls.
• Verified (and improved) support for most recent Sun and IBM JDKs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX.
• Added new "Remote File System" example that demonstrates how one can implement remote file system access (including reading file data) by using the Java RMI framework.

Recently some additional flash demos were created, showing how to create and run a simple print server application with the server running on Linux and the client running on Windows. You can also read more about the standard features of the RMI Plug-in, such as the stubs builder, the application launcher, registry inspector, RMI Spy and element wizards. URL: http://www.genady.net/rmi/v20/ Update Site: http://www.genady.net/rmi/v20/install/

The RMI Plugin aids in RMI development by generating the RMI stub and skeleton files...

As of the J2SE 5.0 release, stub classes for remote objects no longer need to be pregenerated using the rmic stub compiler....

But the RMI Plug-in can do much more than just generating the stubs. Take a look!

As of the J2SE 5.0 release, stub classes for remote objects no longer need to be pregenerated using the rmic stub compiler....

+1 I don't understand what's the main feature of this plug-in. Since 5.0 stubs are generated in runtime. Other features don't look very useful, after all, most IDEs have a debugger where you can look which object are registered in registry, and which parameters are passed to method.

Whether the features are useful or not depends on the amout of RMI programming you do. You can do all your RMI work without it, just as you can do all of your Java programming using just notepad and "javac". Just a small convenience feature - do you rembember all the -D arguments that affect RMI? Do you master the codebase syntax? The RMI Plug-in can help you there. As to registry objects - you can call Registry.list() using the Display view, but for a larger project, when somebody else puts the objects in the registry you'd like to know additional information, such as what is their class hierarchy, methods, etc. The RMI Spy is also more useful than you think (but in a small 100 lines project, you probably won't need it indeed). In a large project, where you have tens or hundreds of remote classes and there are remote calls are all over the system, you can't trace and time them all with the debugger (especially when you're not using stubs!). So the RMI Spy gives you a very useful summary of everything that happens with your application. To summarize - you don't need it for small school projects, but you'll feel the difference in RMI-intense projects. If you want to give it a try and need any kind of help, feel free to drop me an email to rmi-info@genady.net

I've done RMI development for 15 years. All features that this plugin provides can be done as an open source. My company would never pay for it.