What are Sinks?
When you work with a remote object, you do not hold a reference to that object, but a reference to a proxy. The proxy is an object that looks and feels exactly like the remote object and can convert your stack based method calls into messages, and send them to the remote object. In order to send a message to the remote object, the proxy uses a chain of sinks. It calls the first sink in the chain and provides it with the message. The sink optionally modifies the message, and passes it to the next sink, and so on. One of the sinks along the way is a formatter sink. The task of this special sink is to serialize the message into a stream. Sinks after the formatter sink operate on the stream, because at this point the message is no longer relevant (and is provided to the sinks as information only). The last sink in the stream is the transport sink, which is in charge of sending the data to the server and waiting for a response. When response arrives, the transport sink returns it to the pre
