Help: Bridge between Legacy system and Spring via RMI

[rmillerx]

Situation: I have a legacy J2EE system which makes use of several
external services via RMI. I would like to convert the external RMI-invoked
services to Spring. I do not want to write into each of the new services
any RMI code. (If you are going to hardwire RMI code, that detracts from the overall
advantage of moving to Spring in the first place) I have built spring-client to
spring-service tests, but that doesn't help me with the legacy system.
The legacy system is stranded under jdk1.2 and I suspect that adding
Spring services directly to the 1.2 system is not possible and in my case
is not viable for us in our plan to migrate/evolve the application.

So the big question is: Can Spring leverage its declarative remoting to support
traditional RMI remote clients? If it cannot, I would see this as a significatnt
barrier to adoption by companies who would like to migrate existing services
while maintaining a working solution.

[rmillerx]

One of the reasons we do not want to embed RMI code is that at some point
we would like these services to support other protocols and deprecate the
RMI support.

[rmillerx]

I suppose if I used a facade pattern, I could embed RMI in the facade. The internal
services would be free of RMI code and have the adaptability Spring offers to
use other remoting protocols. At some point in the future, the face could be
removed.

Not exactly the solution I was looking for but should work

Any other suggestions would be welcome.

[gfaerman]

See http://forum.springframework.org/viewtopic.php?t=3398 to see requirements of Interface design on the exported service to be reached by legacy rmi clients

Cheers,
Gustavo.