You should consider the meaning of 'exiting', if your client side exits, it does not and cannot close the RAF, so only the actual program who opens it need to, I'm not sure what will happen if you close your program without close an opened file, do not take the risk, just close it and catch exception!
you also have to consider, for example, if you use something like RMI, provinde each client an instance of a class that can manipulate the database, if each client gets
different instances, and all instances shares the same RAF, in this case, you cannot close the RAF when some clients exit (even if all clients exit), you'd better close it when Server exits, but need to carefully design your program so that clients that are still connecting won't get an ugly exception ;-)
forgive my poor English