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
Is the client in Java, use RMI. But that is to simple thought. As it is only a point to point protocol.
REST as a paradigm is interesting if you have e.g. many reads and like to use HTTP technologies for caching etc. The next thing is you likely can easy implement "paging cursors" so you send data as a small page and add info how to retrieve the next page.
Your question basically is formulated as if it is a technology question. Which is the wrong approach. You should not bother about technology but about system architecture. The whole software system, its abilities, its performance, its scaling, its configuration and its maintenance is completely different depending on your usage of RMI or REST.