Hi Rich,
This type of designing question is coming up all the time. I�m pretty sure you know why you cannot have a
servlet pooling data to your web clients; or at least not if you use the standard servlet api. I read once on the net that there is some free open source implementation of servlet api that maintains the connection with the clients (although not sure how it works with http, firewalls, etc). You might do some google search for that.
On the other hand if your clients are internal you might simply tell them that what they want is closed to impossible. The only solution that you can propose to them is to forget about fancy web browsing capabilities and ask them to accept a small standard window that refreshes the data accordingly. That�s it: you�ll implement RMI clients using RMI/IIOP and probably you�ll end up developing a new
EJB layer for that. But this time you can use many of the RMI feature including distributed notifications, etc, while your solution is still standard and robust.
Regards.