RMI vs REST Service

Question

We are developing a service for our portal / web client developed using JSF . My advice was to expose the service as REST but another team member said to go with RMI implementat

Answer 1

The biggest argument against RMI and for REST/SOAP etc is that the client does not have to be Java.

If your front-end could change down the road from JSF to ASP, then you'll be in some trouble.

Other than that, RMI is the way to go. An even better way to go is EJB ( which is a layer on top of RMI ) with additional advantages -- lots of vendors already implement the EJB spec, you get the advantages of object pooling, transaction management etc.