An activation descriptor contains the information necessary to activate an object: the object's group identifier, the object's fully-qualified class name, the object's code location (the location of the class), a codebase URL path, the object's restart "mode", and, a "marshalled" object that can contain object specific initialization data.

An ActivationGroup is responsible for creating new instances of "activatable" objects in its group, informing its ActivationMonitor when either: its object's become active or inactive, or the group as a whole becomes inactive.

Startup options for ActivationGroup implementations.

Activation makes use of special identifiers to denote remote objects that can be activated over time.

An ActivationMonitor is specific to an ActivationGroup and is obtained when a group is reported active via a call to ActivationSystem.activeGroup (this is done internally).

The Activator facilitates remote object activation.

An UnknownObjectException is thrown by methods of classes and interfaces in the java.rmi.activation package when the ActivationID parameter to the method is determined to be invalid.