In our app, we have a semi-singleton sitting on the jsp/web server side that contains translation information so we can translate web pages on the fly to user specified languages. Our language dictionary is mostly static, but ocassionally we have to add new items to it. Right now we handle the synchronization by having each singleton cache object listen for a Tibco broadcast message. This is just straight Tibco rv -- no JMS in the mix. This has been working fine, but we're now in the process of using generic JMS throughout the application and I was wondering if there is a standard j2ee mechanism for standard java objects (not message driven beans), potentially living in a different JVM from the ejb server, to receive asychronous notification of events.

I think you can. I have been working on a project that have client swing app running within aother JVM to subscribe to a specific JMS topic within aother JVM. The client will get notification from the JMS Topic when there are message being sent. We use XML as "text message" (can convert back to java object using castor.. or other xml-java binding thing..) it's been running smooth and people were wondering how we did the real time *synchronization*..