I need to develop a platform in Java to download tweets from Twitter (that was obvious). The idea is to have various computers downloading from the streaming API and a main controller to send tasks (keywords to download and other data) to each fetcher. My problem is related with the connection between this programs. Which is the best way to do this? Actually I'm using RMI to send commands like "stop", "start", "setTask" from the Controller (client) to each fetcher (servers) and a SSLSocket to make a quick validation, but I'm not sure if this is a good idea. I could use TCP sockets but maybe it's not a good idea to have permanent connections. What do you think? Is it a good idea to keep using RMI or should I take another point of view?
Thank you ;)