10.1. An overview of Spring remoting

Remoting is a conversation between a client application and a service. On the client side, some functionality is required that isn’t within the scope of the application. So the application reaches out to another system that can provide the functionality. The remote application exposes the functionality through a remote service.

Suppose that we’d like to make some of the Spitter application’s functionality available as remote services for other applications to use. Perhaps in addition to the existing browser-based user interface, we’d like to make a desktop or mobile front end for Spitter, as illustrated in figure 10.1. To support that, we’ll need to expose the basic functions of the SpitterService interface as a remote service.