I'm thinking about possible alternatives for our EJB based service layer and wondered if it would make sense to use just the service and database layer of Grails together with the Remoting Plugin or is this using a sledgehammer to crack a nut?
Speaking of the Remoting Plugin: is there a standard way of generating a JAR file, that contains the necessary classes to make a remote call to a Grails service from a non-Spring Java application?
Interesting idea. I don't think it'd be overkill at all. The nice thing is that your service would be very portable across protocols and deployment options (e.g. put a controller layer on top and it's instantly embedded). This gives you the benefits of EJB's (persistence) + the ability to use Groovy and GORM.
FWIW, we're using Grails as our service tier; in come cases we use it embedded (as a plugin), in others we expose the services (via controllers) as JSON or SOAP; I see exposing as RMI as a variation of what we're doing (without the controller layer).