Building a Java based stock trading application, need pointers for technologies to use

Question

I am building an application in Java (with a jQuery frontend) that needs to talk to a third party application. it needs to update the interface every two seconds at the most.

Would it be a good idea to use comets? If so, how do they fit into the picture?

What other means/technologies can I use to make the application better?

The application will poll stock prices from a third party app, write it to a database and then push it to the front end every second, for the polling, I have a timer that runs every second to call the third party app for data, I then have to display it to the front end using JSP or something,

well at this point im not sure if I should use a servlet to write this out to the front end, what would you recommend? how should I go about it?

is there any new technology that I can use instead of servlets?

I am also using Berkeley db to store the data, do you think its a good option? what would be the drawbacks, if any for using berkeley..

im absolutely clueless so any advice will be much appreciated.

Thanks!

edit : I am planning to do this so that a deskop app constantly polls from the thrid part and writes to the database and a web app only reads and displays from the database, this will reduce the load on the web app and all it has to do is read from db.

Answer 1

Take a look at using a web application framework instead of Servlets - unless it's a really basic project with one screen. There are lots in the Java world unfortunately and it can be a bit of a minefield. Stick with maybe SpringMVC or Struts 2, the worst part is setting these up, but take a look at a sample application plus a tutorial or two and work from there.

http://www.springsource.org/about

http://struts.apache.org/2.x/index.html

Another option to look at is using a template framework such as Appfuse to get yourself up and running without having to integrate a lot of the framework together, see:

http://appfuse.org/display/APF/AppFuse+QuickStart

It provides you with a template to setup SpringMVC with MySQL as a database plus Spring as an POJO framework. It may be a quick way to get started and up and building a prototype.

Judging by your latency requirement of 2 seconds it would be wise to look at some sort of AJAX framework - JQuery or Prototype/Scriptaculous are both good places to start.

http://jquery.com/

http://www.prototypejs.org/

In terms of other technoloqies to make things better you will want to consider a build system, Ant/Maven are fine with Maven the slightly more complex of the two.

http://ant.apache.org/

http://maven.apache.org/download.html

Also, consider JUnit for testing the application. You might want to consider Selenium for functional testing of the front end.

http://www.junit.org

http://seleniumhq.org/