From:
<http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-1998/jw-08-subjectop.html>

Subject-oriented programming through RMI

Create a shared experience with the 'subject' design pattern

Summary The move is on toward a kind of software that gives people in 
different locations the sense of being together in the same place. 
The notion of virtual community began in chat worlds and games, but 
is now becoming essential to many types of software that have 
traditionally isolated users from each other. As the network becomes 
the universe and the computer becomes the portal, we're beginning to 
view Net-unaware software as the strangely mute artifacts of another 
age. This article describes a straightforward design pattern based on 
Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI). This pattern easily and 
generically facilitates building software for the shared experience. 
(3,200 words)

By Gerald A. de Jong
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Conclusion
For software to give people a shared experience, one essential 
feature must be provided: subjects must appear everywhere "live." To 
achieve this, the subjects must be replicated on all client machines 
and changes must be propagated immediately and automatically with 
minimal network traffic. Java with RMI provides a convenient means by 
which the subject design pattern can be implemented.


About the author gerald.dejong
Gerald A. de Jong has a Java training and consultancy company called 
Beautiful Code BV in the Netherlands. When he's not teaching or 
advising, he finds himself possessed by the spirit of R. Buckminster 
Fuller, working on his unique freeware Java structure-building 
program called Struck and dreaming about elastic interval geometry. 
He hopes to one day populate virtual worlds with evolving digital 
biota.