PJBUG Kickoff last night

So the kickoff meeting for the Philadelphia JBoss User's Group was last night. It was a great presentation from John Mazzitelli of JBoss on the JBoss remoting framework. No link to slides yet, but an OnJava article he wrote is here.

The short story is that JBoss remoting is a simple abstraction layer over what appears to be a protocol neutral object passing API. It lets you send messages as Java objects over plain sockets, HTTP, or RMI. It looks like some of the features of RMI are preserved, like the ability to throw exceptions (although I'm not sure how), although some of the real RPC semantics are lost since Remoting looks to just be an object passing protocol.

Remoting has some strong features like callbacks and server autodiscovery, but doesn't seem quite as powerful as RMI in some others, in particular service discovery (you really seem to need to own both sides of a Remoting conversation).

I really think the sweet spot for Remoting is different from RMI - it's really a lower level protocol. The ability to swap protocols at deployment time is a nice feature for anyone who's deployed in a firewalled environment. The callbacks, autodiscovery and async calls make this look like a decent framework for low level communications where EJB/RMI/SOAP would be overkill, and some of the niceties of remote objects aren't really needed.