Yep, there's a problem there because your http connection is normally used for a quick 2 way communication: applet->servlet and an immediate servle->applet response. Web servers often are able to send data to idling browsers, like traffic web pages that send an update every minute. I would think that you would be able to do a similar thing so that when a chat response finally comes in, the applet will receive the information from the servlet.

What about the design of this thing? You will need to think about what's going to happen. If you have three users, you will have three servlet instances running (one servlet replicated three times) How will one instance of the servlet talk to another instance? One clue is you can use static variables which will have consistent values for all instances of the servlets.

cudabean