Initially I was simply looking for something that would allows site1 to read article content on a site2 on a remote server.

After initial review, not in depth, the product appears to fit nicely in a multiple domain name news portal site, using joomla. Where we can share content based on article meta keys...yes? i.e. main news can feed city news domains, yes?

....But to stay on track with the initial requirement I have....

can JMS support: site1 read remote domain site2 articles and present them? I need to do this as proof of concept and presentation to my customer.

Thanks in advance for helping me get this basic question answered....if it can then I will feel more confident in spending the install time on beat site...

JMS require to have a direct access to the DB and be able to share files and folders on the disk.
Therefore to make it works with a "remove server" you need to have access to the files and folder and also have access to the MySQL server.

Access the DB is not a problem when you can define a connection to another server.
The only problem that you may encounter concern the slave site definition as you may need to have access to the files and folders.
(Remember that the concept is to also share the Joomla PHP code).

If you consider to keep totally independent joomla but try to have access to articles present into another server and display them in a JMS slave site, perhaps you could try to create a fake slave site that define the DB connection to the remote website.
This would give JMS the DB connection parameter.
becarefull that in this case, the slave site will not be used as real slave site (because the joomla PHP code would not be present).
Create such "fake" slave site is probably not easy to do and suppose that you create a fake domain or subdomain to define this foreign DB connection.
You must also check that the remote server accept to access the MySQL server remotely.

This method of DB located on another server is frequently used by share hosting and works perfectly as in the DB connection parameters you have the "host" server infos to specify.

awesome information...thank you....

Once I have my sandbox telineIII genned with JMS...I can test the clone remote DB connect. as suggested. Goal is to replace the existing remote, it's url would just be slave to it's master

Thanks for the super fast reply....I am very familar with your concepts from the mainframe world...this will be a boon for Joomla...something that needed to be addressed.

does one have to purchase without driving it around the block first? I am developing on my localhost then to subdomain of our development site for customer preview. Is that possible or did I miss the trial version of sfw in the downloads...