Currently there is a bit of a discussion going on within our team whether to use the Remoting interface for services or not. When using EDRA, Remoting is one of the possibilities for creating a service interface, the question is: is Remoting the best option to use?

One of the ideas is to use a Remoting interface for ‘business information’ services and a webservice interface for the ‘business process’ services. I think this decision is primarily driven by a better performance that Remoting is supposed to bring us.

Personally I am not sure if performance is the best thing to base a decision on in a SOA environment. Using services implies crossing boundaries. Crossing boundaries is expensive by default! Of course Remoting can give some performance gain in this case in comparison to webservices but this shouldn’t be an issue in my opinion. If performance is what you want, don’t cross boundaries, don’t use services.

Another disadvantage of using Remoting for services is the lack of security. Of course using one of the EDRA handlers (or a custom handler) can provide some sort of a ‘security solution’ but security isn’t embedded in the design of Remoting.

It’s not that I don’t linke remoting because I do. Remoting can be very useful when using it internally in an application; in some scenarios it can be much more appropriate than using webservices. I only think Remoting shouldn’t be used across application (service) trust boundaries.