Remote data access

Hi all,

I am researching what my options are for a specific scenario that we have
within our company concerning a "mother" iSeries with WAS installed making
DB inquiries/changes/deletes to remote "children" iSeries machines that DO
NOT have WAS installed.  The "children" iSeries boxes could be half way
across the country but will be on our WAN.

The Java pgms on the "mother" iSeries will either be acting as Web Services
or JSP's providing Order,Shipping,AR, etc information back to our .NET
developers or end customers.  When a request comes into the "mother" I would
evaluate if the data they are requesting resides on the "mother" or if I
need to go to one of the remote "children" iSeries machines.

I am looking for the best way to connect and access information on the
remote "children".  We would not be looking at doing large datasets but
rather smaller paging type routines (pull back 10 - 50 records of a result
set at a time).  I know that some of my options are to do straight JDBC, EJB
(entities), but other than that I don't know what else is a good idea or for
that matter what is best.  (I have been reading a little about Hibernate but
don't quite have a grasp of how it works)

Just curious as to how some of you on this list would implement something
like this?  It is not an option to load WAS on each of the remote machines
and redirect requests to the appropriate machine because the "children" are
not suited to run a heavy weight app server like WAS.

Thoughts?

Aaron Bartell