Imagine a Java client/server ERP application serving up to 100 concurrent users, both web and swing clients. For persistence we can use Persistence API and Hibernate. But when it comes to client/server communication, do we really have an alternative to using an AS with EJBs to keep down the programming costs of remote communication?
It seems a very heavyweight solution to throw in EJBs and an application server, just for remoting stuff. There is also the standard way using RMI, but who wants nowadays to code everything on his own…
I know that you’ll get a lot of features for free with an AS in addition to the remoting part. And, maybe it’s the way to go. But, are there really any other (low programming cost) alternatives to an AS for doing client/server communication for an enterprise application?
Personally I consider Seam to be the ultimate solution to the problem I don’t have but that aside, there are lots of options and Spring is used for most of them:
The advantage of the HTTP based remoting methods is that they easily plug into Spring’s security models. Plus then you get access to things like interceptors.