Facebook Trumps

Facebook Trumps is a game, which would imply quite a great deal of interaction between the user and the web application. For scalability reasons I wanted the client part of the web application, running in the browser, to do a lot of the work. If a HTTP roundtrip is required everytime an action occurs or decision needs to be made my server is going to get very busy.

This implies quite a "fat" client, however the option I was anxious to avoid was applets (http://java.sun.com/applets/). I've seen some applets which work well - but their major pitfall is that they are basically desktop applications- albeit running in a sandbox spawned "through" a browser. Also you that "clunk" delay as the JVM initialises and the applet loads (that is if the user has a JVM installed!).

Much better to my mind is the Google Web Toolkit (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/). GWT allows GUI and other code written in the Java language to be compiled down to Javascript and then run through a browser. This seems an ideal approach for this problem, given that I have decided on Java. Any standards based browser can display the interface created, and yet I can work in the Java language.

Labels: applets, gwt, scalability