rmi timeout question

[Fabio Luis De Paoli]

I'm designing a corporate application that will have an applets talking to
remote RMI objects. The frequency of their "conversation" will depend on
the user's input, therefore I may have periods of silence longer than 10
minutes. As far as I understand that will cause me to loose my RMI
connection/reference to the my remote RMI object.

Is there any way to avoid that? Would it be a good idea to implement a
dummy ping() method on the remote object and have a thread on the applet
pinging it every 5 minutes or so?

Thanks & regards,

Fabio