What is RMI ?

is... Remote Method Invocation.

It allows you to create objects, that are accessible via the network. For example, you can make an object:

public class Compute {
    String compute(String a){
        ... do something....
    }
}

And then... you can call this function from another computer.

Similar technologies: 
RPC (remote procedure call), 
CORBA (common object request br0ker architecture)
.NET Remoting (.net version)
DCOM (distributed COM objects).



