Prior to Chapter 43, you learned how to write standalone applications; such applications are stored and run on your computer.

Commencing with Chapter 43, you learned how to write applets; those applications are stored on a server computer, but run inside a web browser on your client computer.

In this chapter, you learn about RMI, an acronym for remote method invocation; RMI enables a client computer to run a method on a server computer when requested by the client computer. A server-computer class instance is the method target, and a client-computer class instances are ordinary arguments.