Nowadays, distributed Java-based applications could be built on top of a plethora of middleware technologies such as Object Request Brokers (ORB) like CORBA and Java RMI, Web Services, and component-oriented platforms like EJB or CCM. Choosing the right technology fitting with application requirements is driven by various criteria such as economic costs, available features, performance, etc. The main contribution of this paper is to present an experience report on the design and implementation of a simple benchmark to evaluate the round-trip latency of various Java-based middleware platforms. Empirical results and analysis are discussed on a large set of widely available implementations including various ORB (Java RMI, Java IDL, ORBacus, JacORB, OpenORB, and Ice), Web Services projects (Apache XML-RPC and Axis), and componentoriented platforms (JBoss, JOnAS, OpenCCM, Fractal, Pro-Active).