You will still have to answer these and more technical questions. However, providing a simple application that manages the distributed services will allow them to ease into distributed computing with a minimum of headaches. You can give a high level overview of RMI and distributed computing without most of the pain associated with training their support staff. Offering an easy way to configure, stop and start the managed services is the best way to get your clients' administrative staff to become comfortable with your products. Once a client realizes how easy these services are to use, you'll find you have many more allies.
Nothing is more impressive to a client than a simple installation.
Summary Distributed application development is made much simpler in Java by utilizing the RMI packages. However, managing those services, either as a developer or end user, is potentially, quite a bit more complicated. By using one class to manage all of your remote services you can greatly simplify your Java development, deployment, and maintenance. You have gone through the trouble to create remote services for your organization or your client, now you can manage those services without purchasing a Java application server. Russell is a Sun Certified Java Programmer and has been architecting and developing Java solutions since Sun first released the JDK 1.0.