Question

I’m debating whether I should use java RMI or standard Java networking for an application i’m working on.

The app will be a networked system that has heartbeat sensors and failsafe-features. So it’s a 3-tiered system, with at least a DB and java application.

So if my Database fails on one machine, I’d like the 2nd machine to “sense” this.

I’m a bit confused about Java RMI, whether it’s worth it to learn it.

Or if I use standard Java networking , I can do the same as RMI? I mean, if I really know the Java networking well.

Thanks!

Answer 1

These days it is pretty easy to set up web services using SOAP or REST. With REST you can use XML or JSON messages without really having to know all about it. All these types of services can be accessed from .NET code or PHP or Javascript. (Well … SOAP is sort of a pain except in .NET and Java. //personal opinion )

Spring can help you set up a service and a client interface to it is pretty easy. Fairly close to standard Annotations on bean classes and business methods define the interfaces and Spring does the heavy lifting. (I’m talking about Spring Web Services and not the Spring Remoting, though that would work as well. Spring Remoting isn’t much better than RMI IMHO.)

You can also use Jersey (JAX-WS) or Jackson (Parse JSON) to do the remoting. Standard Annotations on bean classes and what-not build the interfaces. CXF will do JAX-WS and JAX-RS as well. Those are Java standards for building services and clients that communicate via remote messages.

Alternatively there are eclipse tools for generating both sides of the remote interface. All are tied to some framework (Axis-2 or CXS are some). Its sort of a code generation thing.

You might want to look into these a bit and see which one resonates with the way you look at things.

I know that I prefer all of these over using RMI. But I haven’t used RMI directly in a long time.