Is Spring's httpinvoker tied to servlets in a J2EE/Tomcat environment, or can it also be used in stand-alone applications (J2SE) too. To me this dependency seems to be the case because each tutorial I read says you should add a servlet to your web.xml.

Our need is to expose (JPA based) DAO's/services to remote (rich) clients. Until now we haven't found a real need for using a web server yet.

Performance wise, would RMI be just as good?