8.4. Using Spring’s HttpInvoker

The Spring team recognized a void between RMI services and HTTP-based services like Hessian and Burlap. On one side, RMI uses Java’s standard object serialization but is difficult to use across firewalls. On the other side, Hessian/Burlap work well across firewalls but use a proprietary object serialization mechanism.

Thus Spring’s HTTP invoker was born. The HTTP invoker is a new remoting model created as part of the Spring Framework to perform remoting across HTTP (to make the firewalls happy) and using Java’s serialization (to make programmers happy).