When tunneling RMI over HTTP, the Java RMI specification supports only port 80 (default) for HTTP and a fixed URL path of /cgi-bin/java-rmi.cgi. This is because a single RMI socket factory is shared by all RMI client stubs. With a shared socket factory, there is no support for each RMI server to specify its own unique connection requirements.

Because this limits the desired configuration options, support has been added that allows the server host, protocol, and port number to be derived from the codebase URL where the calling Java code is downloaded.

If a firewall does not reject connections, then this failover behavior is defeated and there is no indication of the failure. In that case, the client must be configured to use the specific secondary socket factory that is required. The configuration can be done by setting the client’s system property, wt.boot.socketFactory. For applets, an administrator can set wt.boot.socketFactory to an appropriate value, such as wt.boot.WTRMIHttpToCodebaseSocketFactory, in <Windchill>/codebase/wt/boot/boot.properties; then the client checker applet automatically applies this setting to all applet clients.

The secondary socket factories that are used within the master socket factory are listed after their explanation in the failover logic steps described in Configuring RMI for Tunneling over HTTP.