I'm looking to develop two separate (but related) Java desktop applications.
I want the ability for one application to trigger the other, passing in data that can then be edited and passed back, i.e. the communication will be two way. If the other application is already running I want them to just communicate, i.e. I dont want to just pass arguments over the command line, etc.
Generally speaking, what strategies/techniques should I be looking at in order to achieve this?
The easiest is to use RMI without standalone rmiregistry.
Server creates a local registry:
ServerImpl extends UnicastRemoteObject implements Server
rmiRegistry = LocateRegistry.createRegistry(2020);
rmiRegistry.bind("server", aServerImpl);
Client looks it up with an rmi url (similar to corbaloc:)
String url = "rmi://localhost:2020/server";
Server server = (Server) Naming.lookup(url);
I got 1000 calls in under 500 ms in a loop over the same open connection. Yes, that is milliseconds.
Idea and sample from here: https://www.censhare.com/us/resources/blog/article/file-streaming-using-java-rmi