The Remote interface serves to identify interfaces whose methods may be invoked from a non-local virtual machine. Any object that is a remote object must directly or indirectly implement this interface. Only those methods specified in a "remote interface", an interface that extends java.rmi.Remote are available remotely.

Implementation classes can implement any number of remote interfaces and can extend other remote implementation classes. RMI provides some convenience classes that remote object implementations can extend which facilitate remote object creation. These classes are java.rmi.server.UnicastRemoteObject and java.rmi.activation.Activatable.

For complete details on RMI, see the RMI Specification which describes the RMI API and system.