Ok so sorry for being, I guess, a bit off topic but still I think this is the best place to ask. My new semester just started (don’t worry I won’t ask you to do my homework) and this time we have a rather cool subject about www programming in general where we have to do a web service, web abb – whatever as long as it’s “web”. Here’s the problem though, my team and I want to do it with Flex and Java EE but we don’t have much experience about what are they actually used for. I mean we know you can do virtually anything with it, but we don’t really want to lose time on doing something useless. My first idea was to do a “brainstorming” 3D room/service – a place where people could log in have a video conference, a whiteboard, a place to upload pictures everyone could see, some toolbars for google, youtube etc. plus some other features which would make real-time brainstorming easy when you can’t get everyone in one place. But is Flex+Java EE really suitable? I mean I’m 99% sure it’s doable but is it really worth doing it in Flex+Java EE or was the whole purpose of Java EE completely different?
@EDIT: well this was only one of our ideas obviously. I do know the basics of JSP, Servlets, JPA etc. of course but yeah the main goal of this project is to get some actual experience. The problem is we don’t really know is it worth doing something like let’s say a social network (something like extended facebook) for gamers (doesn’t really matter if it already exists) in Java EE or would it only look ridiculous (because PHP or whatever would be a far better choice)? Bottom line is that we are wondering are only large scale applications (for banks etc.) written in Java EE or is it good for anything (even the smaller projects)?
Adobe Connect has many of the features you describe above and was built using Flex and a Java-based backend. The biggest challenge in a real-time collaboration app such as Connect is that each user needs a way to get frequent notifications of what other users are doing. You really can’t get away with polling the server every 5 or 10 seconds because the app won’t be responsive enough. For this reason technologies like AJAX’s “Comet” or Adobe’s BlazeDS / LivecycleDS messaging have emerged. BlazeDS runs on top of Java and has a data push feature that should be sufficient for a school project; its limitations are that it is HTTP-based and has trouble scaling to large numbers of users on a single server.