What is the best way to implement a website where Users can interact together

Question

I am creating a website where users will be able to chat and send files to one another through a browser. I am using GWT for the UI and hibernate with gilead to connect to a mysql database backend.

What would be the best strategy to use so Users can interact together?

Answer 1

I'd say you are looking for comet/AJAX|Server push/etc. See my previous answer on this matter for some pointers. Basically you are simulating inverting the communication between server and client - it's the server that's initiating the connection here, since it wants to, for example, inform the user that his/her friend just went online, etc.

The implementations of this technique change quite rapidly, so I won't make any definitive recommendations - choose the one that best suits your needs :)

Answer 2

COMET is the technology that allows chatting over a web page - It is basically communicating through keep-alive connections. This allows servers to push information to the client. There are several implementations of this on the client side with GWT. Most servers nowadays support this, It is also part of the Servlet 3.0 spec (Which nobody has implemented yet)