RMI vs REST Service

Question

We are developing a service for our portal / web client developed using JSF . My advice was to expose the service as REST but another team member said to go with RMI implementation since its easier to deal in java object from development and testing point of view.

My argument was development and testing efforts with be pretty much the same but we will get all the goodness of REST web services.

FYI : We already have REST setup so there is no extra cost in framework support. This services are exposed for our smartphone client who uses REST api.

At the end our Manager decided to go with RMI way but I still think REST would be smarter way.

What would be your choice REST or RMI?

Note : Nothing against my team member or Manager just trying to learn here.

Answer 1

If there are firewalls between your client and server, it is likely that RMI traffic might be blocked. HTTP traffic is open on most firewalls and REST should have no problem getting through.

Answer 2

The biggest argument against RMI and for REST/SOAP etc is that the client does not have to be Java.

If your front-end could change down the road from JSF to ASP, then you'll be in some trouble.

Other than that, RMI is the way to go. An even better way to go is EJB ( which is a layer on top of RMI ) with additional advantages -- lots of vendors already implement the EJB spec, you get the advantages of object pooling, transaction management etc.