Remoting with different versions of Spring (RMI, Spring's HTTP invoker or Hessian)

Hi.

I need to do RPC between two applications in the following scenario:

- Each application uses a different version of Spring.

- One of them, is a third party application. So I’ll never take control of which version of Spring will they use in future versions. Currently they are using 2.0.8.

- Our application is based on Spring 2.5.x and soon will use 3.0.x

- Applications are in different machines.

- Both applications could have the same operating system (SunOS 5.9). But is preferable to have the possibility of change.

- Both applications run on different JVMs with the same version of JDK.


I’m interested in use RMI, Spring's HTTP invoker or Hessian.

I have been advised against RMI for this scenario (http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=81788)

Are versions 2.0.x of HTTP Invoker compatible with posterior versions? What guarantees do I have that it will keep working in future versions of Spring?

And the same question also applies to Spring-Hessian.

Thanks in advance.

Using HTTPInvoker shouldn't be a problem, one thing to remember is that it uses java serialization to invoke the method and to transfer the method parameters and result. So all objects should be serializable and you should make sure that the classes are both on the client and server. The same basically applies for the hessian/burlap protocol.

Thanks a lot.