My organization wants to move away from web UIs to thick clients based on Swing. I need to know the best practice for integrating a Swing client to the mid tier. I'm thinking that we should maintain our stateless session EJBs in JBoss rather than use RMI out of the box, because JBoss (and other app servers) provides its own proprietary RMI-like protocol that is lighter and faster than RMI. But I'm not crazy about continuing to use EJBs and JBoss.

I don't want to use Web Services because I don't want the overhead.

Is there a better alternative to Stateless Session EJBs to integrate a Swing client to a Java mid tier?

Thanks!
-Edgar