Seam vs. Ruby on Rails for chat application?

[btonez]

Hi all, this is my first foray into the Seam community.  I would like to preface my post by saying that I don't expect any code or pseudocode, just quick thoughts and names of technologies I could use.  Anyways, I am trying to decide between Seam/J2EE and Rails for an application where I need high performance, scalable chat communication, where the server will:

(a) receive an XML message from a Flex or Java client and will

(b) need to modify and store every message in a database, and

(c) push the message to other Flex or Java clients in the same chatroom

I'm worried that if I use Rails, I'll see the same outage problem as Twitter when I scale.  But I want to make sure that J2EE and Seam can offer me everything I need.  Also, making as much of the communication RESTful as possible would be a great plus, and I think Rails can do this.  Any thoughts or suggestions?  Thanks in advance for your help!

--Brenton Partridge

[felipealbertao]

Hello Brenton,

I am not a Rails expert, but if you are using Flex I would say that choosing Seam is a no-brainer. Exadel Flamingo tightly integrates Flex to Seam, and IMO Seam and Flamingo is a better solution than Adobe's own offering (Blaze DS). It is really easy to use Flex and Seam with Flamingo.

Seam beautifully handles RESTful calls. See the tutorial section 1.9: http://docs.jboss.com/seam/2.0.2.GA/reference/en-US/html/tutorial.html

Regarding messages... You can certainly use a database, but you should take a look at JBoss MQ (now JBoss Messaging) which is shipped with JBoss, and which Seam offers very nice integration.

Felipe

[btonez]

Muito obrigado Felipe!  This really solves almost all of my problems, and I'm really excited about Seam now.  Regarding JBoss Messaging, I really need the chat transcripts (combined messages) in my main relational database to enable some advanced features.  I'm not too familiar with JMS or JBoss Messaging; can JBoss Messaging forward the messages to one of the sender's conversation-scoped beans to be persisted?

And thanks again for your extremely prompt reply.  Many of the other forums I've been on are not nearly as responsive or friendly.

--Brenton