Communicating between Adobe Air or browser and Java Web Start

Question

We're designing an application and the client has requested that a portion of their app stay in Java Web Start and another portion be in a browser. I'm thinking about AIR as an alternative to the browser because that may give us more features b/c we don't have to stay in the browser security sandbox.

How would I go about having an Air app talk to a Java Web Start app? Do they have to talk through a server? I guess potentially you can just create a socket connection between the two.

Answer 1

You've named the two best options already -- create a socket connection or implement a server API. There are other hackety methods you could use too -- for example, if you're using AIR, you could have both the Java app and the AIR app read/write to a file on disk for communication. This has a host of other issues (file lock when reading/writing) that a socket connection doesn't have, though.