I am looking to implement a web application in which the end user is likely to cause invocation of business logic methods which are both cpu heavy and require a fair amount of memory to run.
My initial thought is to provide these methods as part of a standalone stateless business service, which can run on a separate machine to the web application. This can then be horizontally scaled as much as I need.
As these service methods are synchronous I am opting to us RMI as opposed to JMS.
My first question is if the above approach seems viable or seems to be good, or if my though process has got lost somewhere (this will be the first time I don’t work on a standalone application).
Should that be the case I have been looking at spring RMI which seems to do an excellent job of exposing remote services non-intrusively. However I am unsure as how I could use this API to load balance between multiple servers. Are there any ways of doing this using spring or do I need a seperate API?
JBoss has the ability provide RMI proxies that are automatically load-balanced: http://docs.jboss.org/jbossas/jboss4guide/r4/html/cluster.chapt.html