Ever try to write a J2EE application accessing EJBs across a firewall? It can be messy, and developers often must resort to all kinds of workarounds, none of them particularly "neat." Developers often write a servlet to intercept HTTP requests and delegate them to EJBs, which is kind of a kludge. Another approach that uses tunneling technologies-such as RMI over HTTP-can entail a big performance hit. But there is a better way. You can solve this problem elegantly by using Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE).