Hello everyone,

I first need to apologize for my earlier questions. (You can check my profile for them)They seemed to ask more questions than give answers. Hence, I am laying down the actual question that started all them absurd questions.

I am trying to design a chat applet. Till now, I have coded the applet, servlet and communication between the applet and the servlet. The code in the servlet side is such that I was able to establish chatting between clients using the applets, but the code was more like a broadcast all feature, i.e. all clients would be chatting with each other. That was my first objective when I started designing the chat applet. The second step is chatting between only two specific users, much like any other chat application we have. So this was my idea for it:

1. I create an instance of the servlet that has the 'broadcast-all' code.
2. I then pass the address of this instance to the respective clients.
3. 2 client applets use the address to then chat. Technically the code is 'broadcast-all', but since only 2 clients are connected to it, it gives the chatting between two clients feature. Thus, groups of 2 clients have different instances of the same servlet, and each instance handles chatting between two clients at a max.

However, as predicted, the idea didn't materialize!

I tried to create an instance of the servlet but the only solution for that was using sessions on the servlet side, and I don't know how to use this session for later communications.

I then tried to modify my broadcast-all code. In that code, I was using classes that implemented Observer and Observable interfaces. So the next idea that I got was:

1. Create a new object of the Observable class(say class_1). This object be common to 2 clients.
2. 2 clients that wish to chat will use same object of the class_1.
3. 2 other clients will use a different object of class_1.

But the problem here lies with the class that implements the Observer interface(say class_2). Since this has observers monitoring the same type of class, namely class_1, how do I establish an observer monitoring one object of class_1 and another observer monitoring another object of the same class class_1 (Because notifyObservers() would notify all the observers and I can't assign a particular observer to a particular object)?

I first decided to ask individual problems, like how to create instances of servlets, using objects of observable and observer and so on in stackoverflow... but I got confused even more. Can anyone give me an idea how to establish chatting between two clients only?(I am using Http and not sockets or RMI).

Regards, Mithun.

P.S. Thanks to all who replied to my previous (absurd) queries. I should have stated the purpose earlier so that you guys could help me better.