To build a classical 3-tier architecture, you can use AppFuse as a back end. This full-featured web-framework provides many time-saving features, additionally it's very easy to export the managers as webservice and use them as a backend to your Spring-RCP application.

Webservice configuration

The first thing to do is to configure an existing AppFuse application to export the managers as a webservice. A detailed description can be found in this post: Webservices with HttpInvoker.

RCP configuration

In your Spring-RCP project some configuration files have to be modified, to make use of the new webservices.

src/main/resources/ctx/security-context-client.xml
The following beans have to be configured: src/main/resources/ctx/richclient-remoting-context.xml
This file has to be created, all the managers will get defined here to make them accessible. src/main/resources/remoting.properties
The server address is kept in this configuration file, so it's easier to change in the future at a central location. The configuration file has to be created as well and the following data is added. src/main/resources/ctx/richclient-application-context.xml
To load the server properties on context creation, the following bean definition gets added to the file. pom.xml
Three additional dependencies have to be added to the pom.xml to use Spring-remoting: