Please do not top post.

I do not know about this "star rating" thing but I've seen a couple of people
mention it.  What is this thing of which you speak?

To whom are you speaking?  I certainly have no objection to people posting
information about freely available Java libraries in this group.  Perhaps I'm
not alone in this.

I'm not sure that airing your grievance to the entire newsgroup will resolve
the behavior of the person that annoyed you.  I do know that newsgroups are
public forums, and any time you deal with the public a significant percentage
of folks will be or behave like a.sholes.  The alternative being agoraphobia,
or social anxiety disorder or a number of similar syndromes, I recommend you
let it roll off unless there is a constructive alternative.

Since I do not know about this "star rating" system, I do not know what
safeguards or fairness guarantees it holds, or what its consequences are.
This newsgroup is a free-speech forum, open to all regardless of popularity or
others' evaluations.  From your description, it sounds like AIM's "warn"
system, which I've only ever seen used between colleagues or friends to
intentionally tease one another.  It sounds like it shares the flaw in that
system, that it doesn't distinguish between accusation and conviction.

Unlike AIM, these phantasmagorical "stars" have no influence on UseNet.
Perhaps I have a negative-five star rating, perhaps I'm considered the best
poster in the Universe, perhaps no one has even rated my posts - it makes no
never mind to me.  I don't see these ratings, they have no intersection with
my reality.  I just post away, blithely assuming you reading this will find me
as fascinating as I do.  I don't understand why they cause any trouble.

RMI uses remote method invocation, if I recall from working with it,
you essentially have stubbed out code on the front-end and the
implementation server-side. DolphinNet delivers a serialized object to
the client, at this point it is executed by the client... The client
doesn't have stubbed out versions of the code, rather the client and
server simply need equivalent copies of the class file. To facilitate
this process the actual objects that get distributed must inherit from
the Assignment class in DolphinNet - which isn't too restrictive since
you can include other objects in your inheriting class. So, to
summarize, the main difference is in the way you actually implement
the server, where with RMI you're creating and filling in matching
stubs, DolphinNet allows your implementation to be much more abstract
on the client end, if you set things up properly the client need not
even know what kinds of processes it is running - this is great for
distributed calculations.

You may be asking yourself at this point how efficient this process
is... It actually has proven fairly efficient from bench-marking I've
done, also I have a simple helper Assignment I include with the
distribution that allows you to Zip the information being transfered
on the fly... which is handy.

Ben.